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The ocean surrounding the west coast of British Columbia provides unique leisure and recreational opportunities. The unspoiled waters and miles of undulating coastline, in addition to the numerous species of land and marine wildlife, make it the perfect location for water-based activities.
Blessed with natural wonders, Alaska gloves the superlatives hurled at it with deserving grace, capturing the imagination of visitors and inhabitants alike. The expansive grandeur of the state will help you put the size of your snowshoes in perspective as you marvel at the sight of a brown bear at full amble, or kayak through the dreamy blue wonder of a deep fjord. Despite a reputation for high prices, it's possible to see Alaska on an oil baron's small change - as the hordes flocking to amenable towns and prime wilderness areas every summer have already discovered.
Cruise quietly, watching as giant pinnacles of ice crack off the face of the glacier and float off as icebergs.
This historic town occupies a breaktaking setting on a peninsula along the deep blue waters of the Lynn Canal. Its Tlingit Indian heritage is preserved through art and dance at the Chilkat Center for the Arts. Visit the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve to see Alaskas most magnificent birds.
Hyder was originally called Portland city, and the name was changed in 1914 after Frederick Hyder, a Canadian mining engineer who predicted a bright future for the area. Hyders boom years occurred between the years 1920 and 1930, and the Riverside Mine extracted gold, silver, copper, lead, zinc and tungsten until 1953. By 1956, all major mining had closed except for Granduc Copper Mine in Canada, which operated until 1984. Hyder is known as the "Friendliest Ghost Town in Alaska." Hyder's economy is based primarily on tourism today.
Icy Strait Point is located near the city of Hoonah, the largest native Tlingit Indian settlement in Alaska, and very near Glacier Bay National Park. Home to a historic cannery, the port's connection to the sea is strong. Locals share the sea with humpback whales, orcas, Dall porpoises, seals, sea otters, halibut and all five species of Pacific salmon. It is not uncommon to spot a humpback or an orca while walking along the shore.
Enjoy such stunning sights as green islands, sparkling glaciers, and a coastline that features the most majestic of mountains as you cruise the Inside Passage.
Juneau, the capital of Alaska, was founded during a gold rush in 1880. Today, the former gold-mining town counts among its riches some of Alaska's most spectacular scenery. Nestled at the foot of Mt. Juneau in the Alaska Panhandle, it faces the water from the mainland side of Gastineau Channel. Several magnificent fjords are located along the channel coast, and the majestic Mendenhall Glacier, a favorite of visitors, is nearby.
Ketchikan originated as an Indian fish saltery, but the town's major growth began when it became a supply base and entry port for miners during the 1898 Gold Rush to the Klondike. Much of the town's colorful past is still in evidence, especially in the nearby Indian villages, where you'll see colorfully carved totem poles and hear the fascinating legends that surround them.
You'll be overwhelmed by sheer scenic beauty and you'll feel closer than ever before to the untouched serenity of the natural world.
There it stands before you, moving slowly to sea. Ice chunks as big as a city block and as tall as a three-story apartment building have been know to split and fall into the sea.
Sitka, the site of Russia's initial foray into Alaska, has perhaps the richest history of any Alaskan town. Explore the melding of Russian and Native American cultures, while enjoying the unspoiled landscape at the gateway to remote Southeast Alaska. Both the local residents and abundant wildlife add to Sitka's authentic feel.
When gold was discovered in the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory (just across the border from Alaska), it resulted in the historic Gold Rush of 1898. As thousands of gold-crazed adventurers sought the best starting point for their arduous trek, they found the deepest penetration possible by boat was at the northern tip of the Lynn Canal. This is how Skagway was born.
Nestled between 3,000-foot high granite walls, the narrow, twisting slice of ocean called Tracy Arm Fjord weaves through the Tongass National Forest for roughly 35 miles. The shoreline is spotted with waterfalls created by melting snowcaps and trees sprouting at odd angles from rocky outcroppings. You will have ample time to admire the landscape and perhaps catch sight of a few native animals as you cruise through this port.
Most of Canada's imports from and exports to the Orient and Australia pass through Vancouver, Canada's gateway to the Pacific. From the harbor entrance, you can see the Lion's Gate, made up of twin mountain peaks closely resembling crouching lions. Visitors enjoy discovering this cosmopolitan city, from the shops of Robson Street to historic Gastown.
Located on the southern tip on the island of Vancouver in British Columbia, the city of Victoria is probably best known for its mild climate and active outdoor lifestyle. (In fact, the city has been named the "fittest city" in Canada more than once.) As the capital of British Columbia, the city is very tourist-friendly. Among the many attractions are world-famous gardens, its 150 years of British history, gourmet dining and fantastic shopping.
Wrangell is the only place in Alaska to be once ruled by the the Russians, British and Americans. Prehistoric rock carvings or petroglyphs, dating as early as 8,000 years ago, have been found here.
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Contains rules for both regular OGL play and Feast of Crows.
Contains army lists for both 'light' and dark elves.
Elves are inscrutable, graceful, long lived and knowledgable. Good or evil, light or dark, they bear themselves aloof from the other races and are regarded as untrustworthy, or even downright evil, by many of them.
Elven craft is amongst the finest known, their weapons and armour renown for its accuracy, strength and the delicacy of the artisan's work. No bow is more accurate, no armour lighter, no blade so keen. Their goods are prized, valued, fought for by those of lesser ability.
Their magical knowledge is considerable, honed and fashioned over the long centuries to give them resistance to many magics along with a powerful talent, most especially for enchantments. These enchantments and martial prowess with bows and other stand-off weapons allow the elves to protect their communities, even though they are smaller than those of many other races.
When war comes the elven host will often resemble a silvery pool, light glinting from their mithral weapons and armour and a high keening cry coming from their number as they close to the attack. Arrows flying with uncommon accuracy to strike their enemies down.
There is a dark-half though, an outcast race of elves who call the tunnels and the dark home, the ways of evil. Their grace is decadent, their weapons crafted with subtle evil and the silken tones of their voice come from the spinnerets of spiders, not the joy of ancient tales.
Poison and treachery lurk in the dark but are no less elven than any other?
Feast of Crows is an abstract mass combat system designed to be scalable to most army size conflicts from skirmishes to nations and designed to be compatible both in spirit and in mechanics with the Open Gaming Licence material available, most especially that depicting the pitched battles of heroic fantasy.
You don?t need to spend out hundreds of pounds on figures or spend hundreds of hours painting them to a fiddly, detailed degree. You can make do with scratch paper, your dice and a calculator or any other method of representing the battle you wish to use from miniatures to just keeping the whole idea in your head.
Feast of Crows, by necessity, abstracts the nature of role-playing combat further than it already is. While some heroes, magicians and warriors alike, or some monsters, tamed or bargained into helping an army can make an impact, it is usually as leaders of the rank and file and not as individuals that they will make their mark.
Feast of Crows requires little more preparation than a normal game or a normal set of character sheets and battles involving thousands of troops can be resolved just as quickly, if not more quickly, than normal party-level combat encounters while retaining the heroic, magical feel placed in gamer's imaginations by The Lord of the Rings or other fantasy works.
Feast of Crows is a feast, not only for the scavengers of the battlefield but also for the gamer seeking a good solution to resolving large scale battles as part of their epic campaigns.
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As devastating experiences go, few can match the emotional havoc following the discovery that your partner is cheating on you.
Atop a suddenly shattered world hover pain and rejection, doubts about your worth and the rupture of trust. For Deanna Stahling, discovery struck in a moment that forever fractured time into Before and After.
Stepping off a plane after a week’s holiday with a friend, she picked up a copy of her local paper. There, in the lifestyle section, was a profile of a female executive whose name Stahling had heard a lot lately – her husband worked with the woman. She’d met her, introduced by her husband at a function. The exec, it was reported, was leaving the company to ethically pursue a relationship with a workmate.
Stahling doesn’t remember the trip home from the airport, but the house was empty and her husband’s stuff was gone. A note on the kitchen table told her to refer any questions to his lawyer.
The next day Stahling and her new counsellor began the search for the source of the sudden defection. Like most therapists, hers subscribed to the presumption that there were dire problems in the relationship.
Recently, however, leading thinkers have begun to abandon this mindset. No one doubts that a straying partner is alone responsible for the decision to engage in infidelity. But a new perspective that puts far more emphasis on situational factors has sparked a revolution in understanding affairs.
● Shifting landscape of loveNo one knows for sure just how common affairs actually are. Social desirability and fear of disclosure skew survey responses significantly. In the 2005 Australian Longitudinal Study of Health and Relationships three-quarters of 19,000 respondents viewed affairs in committed relationships as “wrong”. Still, decades of studies show that affairs are as common as celebrity break-ups.
The 2009 Great Australian Sex Census found that 47 per cent of male and 44 per cent of female respondents had been unfaithful and more than 400,000 Australians are paid members of the adulterous dating website Ashley Madison. The latest surveys also reveal a notable shift in the demographics of deception since the Mad Men era. Among those under 45, the rates of infidelity among men and women are converging.
Psychologists and sociologists attribute the development to huge changes in opportunities, particularly the massive movement of women out of the home and into the workplace; studies show that the majority of individuals did the dirty at work. More cash in our hands means we’re less risk-averse, probably because we’re less dependent on a partner for support.
That doesn’t mean that there are no gender differences in affairs. For us, infidelity is driven more by our emotional needs not being met in a relationship, especially when it is not a partnership of equals. For men, infidelity has been more independent of the happily married scenario.
While the landscape of illicit love has been shifting, experts have remained fixed in the belief that affairs occur because something is radically wrong with you and your boyfriend. Make no mistake – most couples stay and want to stay together after a partner has strayed, despite the enormous trauma to the uninvolved person. Yep, 70 per cent of couples choose to rebuild the relationship after infidelity, although they may not quite know how.
While relationship dissatisfaction has been linked with straying, there’s proof that in almost two-thirds of cases, these problems are the effect, not the cause, of cheating. And affairs themselves skew perceptions of the marriage. Once someone has cheated, partners tend to look back on their relationship and see it as having been flawed all along.
Having 100 per cent focus on relationship flaws, reckon the field’s leading thinkers, encourages couples to get psychologically stuck, stewing on the emotional betrayal and playing the blame game. There is no set time period for the hurt and anger that follow a partner’s affair. But for the sake of everyone involved, if you’re the one hurt you’re often rushed into “moving on”, burying distrust and resentments that fester underground or emerge Elin Woods-style, golf club in hand.
● An affair to rememberThere are many contributing factors (often nothing to do with the marriage), says psychologist Dr Barry McCarthy. The most common reason: high opportunity. People fall into affairs rather than plan them.”
Common contexts or causes include:
1 | The workplaceProviding large numbers of people with constant contact, common interests, an income to camouflage the costs of socialising outside the office and an ironclad excuse, the workplace is the ideal place for affairs to fester.
A study of more than 4000 adults in the Journal of Family Psychology revealed those who worked but whose spouses didn’t were the most likely to be unfaithful. Opportunity at the office is most ominous when it mixes with uneven power on the home front (think Jesse James and Sandra Bullock).
“But no one profession has a lock on infidelity,” says Dr Kristina Coop Gordon, professor of psychology at the University of Tennessee, US.
2 | Travel frequency“You’re away from your partner, maybe even missing your mate, and you’re in situations where you’re encountering plenty of people,” Gordon says. “It certainly facilitates one-night stands.”
3| Level of educationAs this increases, so does your likelihood of cheating. It may be a marker for more liberal attitudes toward sex. Ditto history of divorce, or divorced parents, especially if either had an affair. Women with a higher education than their husbands have more affairs, perhaps because they are less dependent on a spouse.
4 | Personality differencesSpouses who are comfortable with conflict are less likely to have affairs. Openness is also a characteristic of noncheaters. Associated
with intelligence, creativity, curiosity and insightfulness, openness makes you more satisfied with your relationship and better able to express feelings, including love.
Some researchers believe that openness is essential to commitment and enduring satisfaction in a relationship.
5 | Level of agreeableness (compassionate and cooperative)Low levels bode poorly for monogamy. More important, however, is whether couples are matched on that trait. Couples who see themselves as more agreeable than their mate believe themselves
to be more giving, feel exploited by their partner, and seek reciprocity in outside relationships.
6 | Self controlStuff like exposure to alcohol, an exhausting day of travel, doing highly challenging work – raise the risk of infidelity. They disable sexual restraint, psychologists Dr Roy Baumeister and Dr Matthew Gailliot have found. Context aside, another cause of affairs, says Dr McCarthy, is that “people do not feel desired in their marriage, and they want to see if they can be desirable outside it.”
● Hypocrisy or hormones?The very make-up of your brain contributes to affairs, too, says anthropologist Dr Helen Fisher. She has found, in brain imaging studies, that there are separate neural systems for sex drive, romantic love and attachment, and they can operate independently.
“You can feel deep attachment to a partner but also feel intense romantic love for someone else while feeling a desire for sex with other partners,” she says.
The attachment system, fuelled by neurohormones oxytocin in females and vasopressin in males, drives animals, including humans, to pair-bond to rear their offspring as a team. Both hormones are triggered by orgasm, and both trigger dopamine release in reward regions of the brain. But almost all animals cheat, even when they form pair bonds.
More recently, in a study of more than 500 men by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, researchers found that variations in a gene that codes for vasopressin receptors in humans influences the very ability to form monogamous relationships.
Men with two copies of a specific gene variant scored lower on a Partner Bonding Scale and reported twice as many marital crises in the past year. Those with two copies of the variant were also twice as likely to be involved in outside relationships and far less likely to have ever been married than those not carrying it.
It’s possible, too, that cheating can serve a positive role in relationships – as a way to gain attention or to signal there are problems in the relationship. A 2010 study by Binghamton University, US, found another payoff – pure, passionate thrill.
● How to move onOne of the great facts of infidelity is that it has such a wildly different emotional impact on each person. The uninvolved partner is deeply traumatised and emotionally distraught over the betrayal, and desperately trying to piece together what happened. The straying partner, often because of deep shame, may get defensive and shut down or blame the other for not moving on, compounding the hurt. One needs to talk about what happened; the other can’t bear to.
Getting on the same track of understanding is the key to recovery, says Dr Gordon, who along with Dr Donald Baucom and Douglas Snyder, professor of psychology at Texas A&M University, US, has sparked the revolution differently in their book, Getting Past the Affair, the first step is for both people to recognise the huge emotional impact on the uninvolved partner.
Dr Gordon and her writing mates have found a powerful device: after encouraging the partners to make no decisions about the future in the immediate aftermath of discovery or disclosure, they ask that the cheated-on partner write a letter to the other describing what the hurt feels like. Awkward, but effective.
“The cheating partner must hear, no matter how discomfiting it is,” says Dr Gordon. “The experience is very intense and usually a turning point. Partners begin to soften towards each other. It’s a demonstration to the injured partner that he or she really matters.”
Then together the couple search for the meaning of the affair. Everything is fair game – attitudes and expectations about the relationship that each person has, conflicts and anything else going on, hidden desires, personal anxieties and insecurities, needs for excitement, the closeness and distance they feel, job demands, work ambience, flirtations, opportunities, the people and pressures around them at home and outside it.
The approach short-circuits the often misguided inclination to focus on The Other Person. From understanding flows forgiveness, which allows the couple to become close again.
● Bringing sexy backDr McCarthy gives the revolution in recovery from affairs another twist – re-eroticising the relationship.“A couple has to develop a new sexual style” that facilitates sexual desire both in and out of the bedroom, he says. The point is to abolish the inclination to compare normal sex with affair sex – a hopeless cause as affair partners don’t have to contend with sick kids or dirty plates, and the illicitness of the liaison intensifies excitement.
Most couples, he says, treat sexuality with neglect – until an affair sets off a crisis. In healthy marriages, sex plays what he deems “a relatively small 15 to 20 per cent part” – but it energises the bond and allows each of you to feel desired and desirable. When couples abandon sex, they wind up draining the entire relationship of its oomph.
“You not only lose the marriage connection but your sense of self,” Dr McCarthy says. “An affair can be an attempt to regain a sense of self.”So Dr McCarthy recommends reconnecting both emotionally and physically. He focuses on
“non-demand pleasure”. He encourages couples to find a mutually acceptable level of intimacy and come up with their own erotic scenarios.
Six years after her disorienting discovery, Stahling is remarried; her new husband shares her taste for travel and adventure. She understands how her frequent work trips – though they never tempted her to stray – hinted at abandonment for her more anxious ex. And how, under the circumstances, his conversations with a female co-worker could have evolved from a chat to sex... something she’ll never know.
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only.
On December 28, a potential strike by the ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association), representing East Coast dockworkers, was averted when union negotiators agreed to extend the contract for another month, and continue bargaining. Both sides took this to be a hopeful sign.
There’s an old joke: An Oxford professor meets a former student and asks what he’s been up to. The student tells him he’s working on a doctoral thesis about the survival of the class system in the United States. The prof expresses surprise. “I didn’t think there was a class system in the United States,” he says. “Nobody does,” the student replies. “That’s how it survives.”
When it comes to strikes, the general public seems more tolerant—more grudgingly accepting—when the shutdowns involve jobs they respect. A good example was the WGA’s (Writers Guild of America) 100-day strike of 2007-2008. The public seemed to accept the fact that these writers had a valid beef with the producers, and were entitled to withhold their labor. After all, a strike is the only “weapon” a union has in its arsenal.
Another example is airline pilots. Although pilots don’t seem to go on strike anymore, when they used to do it—despite the tremendous inconvenience it created—people more or less took the view that these guys must have had a legitimate gripe. As irritating as it was for travelers, people seemed to understand that the pilots were exercising their legal right to hit the bricks. Nurses might fall into this same general category as well.
But let the jobs be ones the public thinks anybody can do (janitors, bus drivers, housekeepers) or ones the public feels are already adequately compensated (autoworkers, longshoremen, electricians), and they freak out. They become indignant. When people hear that bus drivers or hotel housekeepers walked off their jobs in order to seek better wages, they don’t seem to have much sympathy.
The argument can be made that this is all about class distinctions. Let it be a Wall Street banker who’s looking to jack up his $5 million a year to $7 million, and people don’t so much as flinch, even though the average person hasn’t the vaguest notion of how Wall Street operates or how that money is earned (we’re using the term “earned” in its loosest sense).
This ILA dispute is a perfect example. No one is saying dockworkers don’t make a decent wage (even though the figures released by management are wildly misleading). They are firmly entrenched in what is, alas, the rapidly shrinking middle-class. But because they realized they had some leverage here, they were looking to improve their contract. That strategy makes eminent sense. Looking to take advantage of an opening is as American as apple pie.
Indeed, if these people weren’t longshoremen, if they were defense contractors or bonds salesmen or real estate speculators or lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry, they not only wouldn’t be criticized, they’d be applauded for their ambition and resourcefulness What’s that you say? You’re reaching for the brass ring?? By all means, go for it!
But these aren’t bonds salesmen. These are hard-working men and women, dockworkers. So instead of being praised for their initiative and willingness to go the extra mile to provide for their families, the U.S. Maritime Alliance, for public relations purposes, is portraying them as greedy bastards.
And of course, there’s the issue of hypocritical self-interest, which arises every time the profit-motive comes into conflict with political ideology. In 2002, business groups begged George W. Bush to intervene in the lockout of West Coast (ILWU) longshoremen. Why did these anti-government zealots want the government to butt into the “free market”? Because they were losing money. So much for ideological purity.
A startling statistic: The Department of Commerce reported in November, 2010, that U.S. companies just had their best quarter….ever. Businesses recorded profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter of 2010, which was the highest rate (in non-inflation-adjusted dollars) since the government began keeping records more than 60 years ago. And we all thought we were still in a recession?!?
So if money is continuing to gravitate toward businesses, not only in generous amounts, but in record amounts, why are we opposed to the middle-class sharing in that largess? Aren’t working folks, as much as Corporate America, entitled to a larger slice of the pie? As former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich accurately noted, it’s middle-class spending that fuels our economy.
David Macaray, a Los Angeles playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy: Essays on Modern Labor,” 2nd Edition), was a former union rep. He can be reached at firstname.lastname@example.org
Source on Dept. of Commerce statistic, via New York Times.
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South Korea Bank Hacks: 7 Key Facts
That's one of the early takeaways from studies of the attack techniques and malware used in the South Korean cyber attacks, which began Wednesday at about 2:20 p.m. local time. South Korean broadcasters KBS, MBC and YTN, as well as the Jeju, Nonghyup and Shinhan banks, saw their computer networks get knocked offline after their PCs were infected with data-deleting malware.
- How Attackers Identify and Exploit Software and Network Vulnerabilities
- Getting a Grip on Mobile Malware
- Ransomware: Hijacking Your Data
- Securing Big Data: Securosis Recommendations for Hadoop and NoSQL Environments
Here's what's currently known about the attacks:
1. DarkSeoul Malware: No Awards For Sophistication
Sophos, has analyzed the malware -- which it dubbed "DarkSeoul" -- used in the attack, and found that the malicious code attempted to deactivate two antivirus products that are popular in South Korea: AhnLab and Hauri AV. Despite that, however, the malware hardly qualifies some advanced persistent threat.
[ Were known security flaws an issue in this attack? Read HTTPS Security Encryption Flaws Found. ]
"What's curious is that the malware is not particularly sophisticated. Sophos products have been able to detect the malware for nearly a year, and the various commands embedded in the malicious code have not been obfuscated," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, in a blog post. "For this reason, it's hard to jump to the immediate conclusion that this was necessarily evidence of a 'cyberwarfare' attack coming from North Korea."
Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, likewise noted that the malware was relatively unsophisticated. "Out of all the possible things you could do with a compromised machine, wiping it empty is the least useful thing for an advanced attacker," he said on Twitter.
2. Targeted Organizations Still Struggling To Recover
Whether or not the malware rates as highly advanced, the targeted organizations' networks were paralyzed after the Wednesday attacks, leading to disruptions that disabled ATMs and smartphone banking websites for the financial firms. Targeted television stations, however, were able to continue broadcasting.
By Thursday, many of the affected organizations reported that they'd restored their networks, but had yet to fully recover all of their wiped PCs. "We successfully recovered our mainstay network related to programming and advertising this morning, and normalized our service," an official at Korea's largest television station, KBS, told South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. "But we are still working to recover around 5,000 personal computers that came under the attack, and our website is still inaccessible."
3. Malware Included Linux Wiping Capability
As that suggests, the malware used in the attacks was quite effective at deleting data. According to research published by Symantec, the malware -- which it dubbed Trojan.Jokra -- "is a Trojan horse that attempts to wipe the hard disk of the compromised computer" and can infect numerous versions of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows 7, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista and Windows XP) as well as Linux systems.
The malware wiped Windows computers by overwriting their master boot record (MBR) and any data stored on the PC, then instructed the PC to shut down, "which renders the computer unusable as the MBR and the content of the drive are now missing," according to Symantec's analysis.
The malware also includes a module designed to remotely wipe any Linux machines that are connected to the same network as the infected PC. "We do not normally see components that work on multiple operating systems, so it is interesting to discover that the attackers included a component to wipe Linux machines inside a Windows threat," Symantec said. "The included module checks Windows 7 and Windows XP computers for an application called mRemote, an open source, multi-protocol remote connections manager."
An XML file maintained by mRemote lists saved connections with remote systems, and the malware "parses this XML file for any connection with root privileges using the SSH protocol," said Symantec. The malware then uses a bash script to upload and execute a temporary file on the Linux system. "The bash script is a wiper designed to work with any Linux distribution, with specific commands for SunOS, AIX, HP-UX distributions," according to Symantec. "It wipes out the /kernel, /usr, /etc, and /home directories."
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History and development of TMC and new conversion technology
This article is a summary of the Chemical Coaters Association International (CCAI), Twin Cities Chapter, symposium on transition metal conversion coatings (TMC) and other non-phosphate, or combination inorganic and organic conversions, as well as straight organic conversion packages. The symposium was held Feb. 4 in the Twin Cities’ suburb of Eagan, Minnesota. The author moderated the event. Presenters included Dave Chalk, Galaxy Associates; Terry Giles, Henkel Technologies; Ken Kaluzny, Coral Chemical; and Gary Nelson, Chemetall. The primary purpose of this CCAI symposium was to provide an up-to-date overview and explanation in a user friendly fashion of the key components of this technology so that finishers can thoroughly investigate this expanding new development in pretreatment.
Transition metal conversion coatings (TMC) didn’t just happen or magically occur. This development is the expansion and continuation of the quest to eliminate chrome from finishing and provide paint and powder coating performance in a greener more environmentally suitable world. Understanding how TMC originated or grew over the past several decades and years will further your ability to both understand and implement this advancement.
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Fields of Activities
|Calendar of Activities|
|Higher Education ForA|
|European Higher Education Area|
The Bologna Process
Council of Europe Contribution
Bilateral and regional activities
|Recognition of Qualifications|
of Europe/UNESCO Convention
The ENIC/NARIC Network
|Results of prior activities|
Sites of Citizenship
Legislative Reform Programmes
|Resources / Documents|
|Higher Education Series|
New Higher Education project in Serbia
A major project to support higher education reforms in Serbia was concluded in May 2007. The impetus for this positive development started during the 4th Conference of Ministers of Education from the Western Balkans held in Strasbourg in November 2006, when the Serbian Minister asked the Council of Europe’s Director of Education to help Serbia meet the requirements of the Bologna Process. Thanks to close co-ordination and support from the CoE office in Belgrade, the new joint project was signed six months later with the European Agency for Reconstruction (the European Union's main assistance instrument in the Balkans). The project will last for two years and totals over half a million Euros.
Anchored in the Bologna Process, the project aims to support and accelerate higher education reforms in Serbia, allowing the Serbian universities to be in line with developments at a European and international level. Young people in Serbia will thereby benefit through more efficient higher education institutions and hopefully their qualifications abroad will be better recognised. Better managed, democratically governed higher education institutions will also be beneficial for the society as a whole.
The project is designed to assist in meeting these goals by focusing on four interconnected areas:
§ Implementation of quality assurance based upon the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area as adopted by the Ministers of Education in 2005;
§ Recognition of degrees and study periods;
§ Elaboration of a national framework for qualifications compatible with the overarching framework for qualifications in the European Higher Education Area;
§ Reviewing higher education legislation.
The project will be officially launched in September 2007 under the Serbian Chairmanship of the Council of Europe.
To visit the website of the Council of Europe office in Belgrade, click here
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"It doesn't make sense," Arroyo said of his 82 percent cost increase. "They're driving people away from insurance, instead of towards it. Our insurance has increased dramatically every year, and no one seems to have any answers."
Arroyo said he was shocked and confused when he received a flier a few weeks ago indicating his wife will soon be charged an additional $50 per month as a "spousal surcharge" because his wife, a nurse in the WellStar Health System, elected not to take the insurance package her company offered and instead joined her husband's United Healthcare plan.
He called United for more information, and sure enough, they told him the fee would start in January because his wife had declined her own employer's insurance, he said.
David Bottoms, vice president of the Bottoms Group, a benefits consulting firm in Marietta, said more health insurers will be charging spousal fees in the future, as it often costs companies more to take on an added dependent than it would for the spouse to enroll in group health insurance offered by his or her own employer. Bottoms said the surcharge only applies when a spouse declines other insurance for which they are eligible.
Tobacco surcharges, and even obesity surcharges are also growing in popularity among large companies trying to hold down their insurance costs, he said.
Bottoms said that the average health insurance plan will cost 12 to 15 percent more next year - and that some initiatives in the federal healthcare reform act will add another two percent cost increase.
"The federal healthcare reform didn't really accomplish the goal of lowering healthcare costs, because they'll actually go up. But there will be expanded eligibility and expansion of coverage, and it's just going to cost more because there are more benefits," Bottoms said. "There will be a lot of government subsidies to lower the costs to individuals who qualify at a certain income level. And right now it just results in a two percent increase - the bulk of the increases are coming from the insurance companies. But once it gets to 2014 and all of the healthcare reform initiatives are implemented, all bets are off."
Some changes took effect in September, six months after President Barack Obama signed the healthcare bill into law. Those changes include allowing individuals to stay on a parent's insurance through age 26 and regardless of student status; prohibiting exclusions of preexisting conditions for children; and removal of caps on lifetime benefits.
Prohibiting preexisting-condition exclusions on children's insurance puts greater risk on health insurers, Bottoms said, and most carriers simply stopped writing individual health policies for children last spring.
Bottoms attributed the rising health insurance costs to medical advances - and litigation.
For one, doctors order multiple tests, in part to avoid liability lawsuits if a disease is not caught. Prescriptions are also expensive, adding to an insurer's cost.
Bottoms also said that although residents can choose to keep their insurance plans, they lose that grandfathered status if they change insurance carriers or if an employer makes many changes to the plan.
"It's going to be hard to keep that same plan long-term, because some of the things like benefit extensions or benefit caps are going to happen regardless," Bottoms said.
Bottom line, Bottoms said, costs will go up, even though most are not a result of federal healthcare reform - yet.
"Sometimes you'd think they'd just let you keep what you have and not charge you more, but they don't give you that option," Arroyo said. "Eventually, I'm afraid it's going to get to the point where no one can afford health insurance."
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Contact dermatitis (sometimes called allergic contact dermatitis) is caused by allergens that come into contact with the skin. Allergic contact dermatitis often clears up on its own when sufferers avoid the offending agent.
Contact dermatitis is an example of hypersensitivity. Literally defined as “inflamed skin,” dermatitis appears in a localized area as a rash, small blisters, swelling, or redness. Contact dermatitis has two categories of distinction: irritant contact dermatitis and allergic contact dermatitis. Irritant contact dermatitis is caused by a substance that is likely to cause a reaction in nearly anyone who is exposed to it in large quantities.
Allergic contact dermatitis is caused by your body coming into contact with an allergen and reacting. It’s the body’s immune system being hypersensitive to a foreign agent. “The body may come into contact with the allergen through direct contact, such as touching, or through airborne contact, such as an allergen landing on the skin,” says Dr. Schalock. When the allergen comes into contact with the skin, redness, swelling, a rash, or blisters develop, creating an itchy, irritated area on the skin. If the exposure is brief and then removed, the reaction will clear on its own.
Nearly anything can be the cause of allergic contact dermatitis, because each person’s body responds differently to allergens. So, jewelry, plants, lotions, glues, polish, acrylics, wool, gasoline, perfume, metals — the list goes on and on — could cause the skin to react and swell in one person, but be completely benign to another. Another complexity of allergic contact dermatitis is that a person could have been in contact with a substance — a lotion, detergent, salon products — for years with no reaction and then suddenly develop a reaction without explanation.
July 1, 2009
Red, Swollen patches? Blister-like bumps? Chances are it’s contact dermatitis, but only the doctor can say if it’s a simple case of irritation or a more serious allergy.
March 1, 1993
When a client exhibits redness, small blisters, swelling, separation of the nail plate from the nail bed, or tenderness of the nail bed and nail folds, this usually indicates contact dermatitis, a skin allergy to a product or ingredient.
February 1, 1993
Does red, rough skin, small blisters, and separated nails sound familiar? What you may be calling a fungal infection could be an allergy to nail products.
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Ralphie's Folks and Holiday Parenting
A good Christmas movie usually includes a miracle. There was “The Miracle on 34th Street.” There were the ghosts who redeemed Ebenezer Scrooge. And, in “A Christmas Story,” there are two miracles. Ralphie gets his BB gun. And, despite some mistakes, Ralphie’s parents have two happy and healthy kids.
70 years after it was first uncovered in “A Christmas Story,” what nine-year-old Ralphie Parker described as “the conspiracy of irrational prejudice against” the BB gun continues. Plenty of parents can still be found who “know nothing about creeping marauders burrowing through the snow toward the kitchen where only you and you alone stand between your tiny, huddled family and insensate evil.” A member of the conspiracy is Lexington mom Myra Beth Bundy.
“Because I’d be afraid they’d shoot their eye out,” said Bundy
Bundy is a mother of five, four of them boys. So far, none of them have asked for a BB gun and she hopes they don’t.
“I have a strong desire to not have my boys play with weapon-toys, but, I don’t want to go so far about that, that I make them become more obsessed with them, or think about them more, or want them more,” said Bundy.
In managing such an obsession, Bundy has an edge. She’s a child psychologist who teaches at Eastern Kentucky University. Doctor Bundy says most kids Ralphie’s age are, by nature, materialistic. While an adult might wish for peace on earth, a nine-year-old thinks true happiness can be found in a box.
Such knowledge gives champions of the anti-BB gun movement an edge. If done with skill, Bundy says, a parent can shift a child’s obsession to a different toy.
“I don’t know if I would have been effective, Ralphie was pretty serious about this. But, if I had been the mother, I probably would have tried distraction, for one thing. I would have probably have tried to think, ‘geesh, what else might Ralphie like? What else would be pretty interesting, but not as dangerous as a B-B gun,” said Bundy.
That was Mrs. Parker’s parenting mistake. Instead of taking charge of the situation and pushing a viable alternative, she based her argument on fear.
That doesn’t mean those fears are groundless. Each year, The U-S Consumer Product Safety Commission says four people are killed by BB guns or pellet rifles.
Unlike Ralphie’s Red Ryder, which was first manufactured in 1940, the modern BB gun is much more hazardous. Susan Pollack with the Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center says they have faster muzzle velocities.
“BB guns use to be things people played with when we were little, but, they’ve improved them to be bigger, better, faster, stronger models. So, they have much more power than they had when we were little and now they can shoot people, if you shoot somebody through the eye, it might just go into their brain, and they can shoot people into their chests. And, so BB guns have become really, like, small, real weapons,” said Pollack
Even the Red Ryder’s relatively slow muzzle velocity still poses a risk. It can indeed severely damage an eye.
Balancing fun and safety is a problem Pollack and many parents wrangle with every December. Alongside B-B guns, Pollack worries about their modern-day equivalents…such as the All-Terrain-Vehicle. Whether buying an ATV or a BB gun, she urges parents to minimize the risks.
“If you’re going to go buy a BB gun, if you’re going to, have to give into that peer pressure, if you will, if you can make the safest choice in that group, and make sure they have protective equipment and supervision, then, I guess, that’s the best advice I could give,” said Pollack.
Despite a wall of warnings from people like Susan Pollack, Ralphie’s mom, his teacher and even Santa Claus, on Christmas morning, the boy acquired “an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle.” “The Old Man” slipped one near the Christmas tree.
At the risk of gender stereotyping, Bundy says, moms tend to be more protective, while dads are more adventurous. That’s the beauty of a two-parent household…she says they provide a child with a balanced upbringing.
“Supposedly, one of the advantages of having two adults raising a child, or children, is that a child can see different perspectives, a child can learn about how two adults may work out conflict between the two of them, so I think it’s good for Ralphie to have parents disagreeing on this issue. Now, it may not be great that the father snuck the BB gun under the tree, but I’m sure Ralphie got to see the two of them have a discussion about it, don’t you think?” said Bundy.
Such fatherly advice, according to Joe Murphin, is comedic, but won’t win anyone a prize for parenting. Murphin heads marketing for Daisy Outdoor Products…the Arkansas company that makes the Red Ryder Air Rifle.
B-B gun experts in the audience can only watch with horror when they see Ralphie has hung a paper target over an old-metal sign. The projectile bounces back, just missing an eye. Joe Murphin, who heads marketing for Arkansas-based Daisy Outdoor Products, says “the old man” didn’t do his job.
“No he didn’t. He sat there in his bathrobe with his bowling ball on the sofa and he didn’t get up and do his job. That’s the sad part of the movie and thankfully everything came out okay and the only victim was a pair of child’s glasses.”
That was Mr. Parker’s mistake. On every BB-gun Daisy makes, Murphin says parents are reminded to provide proper adult supervision.
Murphin has a theory about the appeal of “A Christmas Story.” He says people like it because it refreshes a special childhood memory…
“The Red Ryder BB gun, or your first BB gun, whatever it was, is an important memory because, if you stop and think about it, it meant that your parents believed in you, believed that you were mature enough to handle the responsibility,” said Murphin.
Psychologist Myra Beth Bundy finds such “spin” interesting, but, draws a different lesson.
“I just think you have to use your own best judgment. Only you know your child and what you think your child can handle. Ralphie’s mom thought she knew him pretty well and it turned out she did know him pretty well. He had some problems with the gun,” said Bundy.
As each mom and dad knows, no parent is perfect and we can only strive to be “good enough” and learn to live with the guilt. Easy answers are elusive. Plus, ideal parents can make a movie pretty boring. So, we give Ralphie’s folks the benefit of the doubt and each year share in Ralphie’s triumph and sympathize as his parents struggle to keep him and his brother both happy and safe.
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In the ever competitive marketplace companies need to take advantage of the technologies that are available to them. Replacing dated technologies like the paper chart recorder with better more advanced technologies seems like a logical choice but many companies have been reluctant to change or simply not be aware of the cost savings involved. By using a modern humidity and temperature data logger users have the advantage of better accuracy, more functionality, less maintenance and an overall cost savings.
Traditional manufacturing methods, like machining and injection molding, have many rules, restrictions, and limitations. These rules don’t apply when using direct digital manufacturing. Designers are free to concentrate on the best design and not concern themselves with manufacturability.
3D laser scanning technology is helping companies get the data they need in product design including inspection, CAD comparison, reverse engineering, and more.
In product design and development, efficiency is key. Read this white paper to learn about 3D technology that helps companies design better products faster
In the electronics industry, contract manufacturing has long been a strategy for reducing time to market and simplifying project oversight. With today's complex production environment, you need to ensure the intricacies of your project are addressed — without adding extra cost. And that means doing your homework. In our white paper, "Contract Manufacturing Pitfalls: What the Wrong Production Process Could Really Cost You," we uncover eight hidden cost centers — and show you how to avoid them. Read our white paper now!
The FDA mandates validation of incubators, refrigerators, freezers, stability chambers, warehouses, and other controlled environments. Download this NEW application note, which covers five key questions you need to have answered in planning a temperature and humidity mapping study that complies with current GxP guidance. Ensure that your next environmental mapping project is aligned with the core principles behind validation.
A 3D printer is a machine that creates objects from plastic or other materials using an additive manufacturing process. Additive manufacturing produces objects in a succession of layers from the bottom, up. This is the opposite of traditional subtractive manufacturing processes.
In this collection four experts discuss several ways to reduce the risks of failed inspections, bad measurement practices, and poor product quality in controlled environments. Topics span from measurement accuracy, uncertainty, stability, and traceability, to a discussion of wired v. wireless connectivity for sensing instruments, to FDA inspection preparation and 483 responses. These articles offer a surfeit of tweaks, tips, and tricks for developing better quality management systems for GxP-compliant environmental monitoring applications.
The terms “3D printing” and “additive manufacturing” refer to processes that automatically build objects layer by layer from computer data. The technology is already well-used in many sectors including transportation, health care, military and education.
Finite element representations of crash test dummies are widely used in the simulation of vehicle safety systems. Utilize component models from the Abaqus Finite Element Analysis software to validate test data under different loading conditions and rates
Employ Abaqus Finite Element Analysis to design mobile device keypads for fewer typos.
Learn how an onsite 3D Printer can bring economic returns and competitive advantages through enhanced innovation, more productive design cycles and higher-quality designs
A compelling read that at times is light hearted and funny, 7 Habits of Quality Obsessed Manufacturers is written for top performing quality professionals that want to give their company an edge. The ebook takes a closer look at:• How to brag about quality • What successful manufacturers have in common with Einstein • Who plays the starring role in your company • How to not make easy hard • Making the cloud your answer to supply chain visibility • How to choose between "do something" and "do nothing" • Giving data an afterlife
This free white paper, 5 Must Have Strategies for Enterprise Quality, shows how quality can take a more prominent, enterprise-scale role. Learn more today about• The trend towards centralizing quality data • Best practices for collecting and integrating multiple data sources • How to monitor and analyze quality real-time • Workflow management to ensure data integrity • Reporting needs of users at all levels
While the goal of pharmacovigilance remains constant, the methods, resources, and regulations that are designed to reach this goal are continuously being updated and optimized. Adding to this inherent complexity, pharmacovigilance also involves the coordinated interaction of multiple players, including patients, healthcare professionals, pharmaceutical companies, and multiple regulatory authorities across various regions.
A compelling read that at times is light hearted and funny, 7 Habits of Quality Obsessed Manufacturers is written for top performing quality professionals that want to give their company an edge. The ebook takes a closer look at: • How to brag about quality • What successful manufacturers have in common with Einstein • Who plays the starring role in your company • How to not make easy hard • Making the cloud your answer to supply chain visibility • How to choose between "do something" and "do nothing" • Giving data an afterlife
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CC-MAIN-2013-20
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http://www.pddnet.com/white-papers
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This text comes to you through a medium. Just like the news, your entertainment, the messages of your friends and family. Modern media surround you. They let you observe your social and natural environment, even yourself. On average our daily media consumption amounts to a staggering 10 (!) hours a day. You are immersed in mediated communication, in a culture of the media. What do you know about it?
The transformation of social structures and cultural patterns in modern society are often closely tied to the centrality of the media in our day and age. Concepts like mediation, mediatization and media culture try to come to terms with analyzing such changes:
“The increasing centrality of media for the exercise of power as well as for the conduct of everyday life in modern society, both for system and for life-world, as well as, crucially, their inter-relationship […] has drawn the study of mediation to the centre of the sociological agenda. The analysis of mediation […] requires us to understand how the processes of mediated communication shape both society and culture, as well as the relationships that participants, both individual and institutional, have to their environment and to each other.” (Silverstone 2005: 202f.)
The above quote by the late Roger Silverstone sets the stage for our engagement with contemporary media culture. We work under the premise that there is sufficient reason to argue that we live in a media society, and the media’s impact surmounts any mere increase in communicative efficiency: it is a thoroughly cultural process that affects nearly every aspect of social life. Two basic observations guide the analysis of media culture:
- The fact that all human sociality is based on the human ability to communicate in a myriad of ways so that our species lives in a cultural realm based on communication as much as in a natural environment.
- That modernity might be understood as fundamentally based on technological means of communication that drastically alter our modes of communication, allowing for further “modernization” of our social systems.
The notion that lies at the heart of any investigation of Media Culture is the constructedness of individual and collective realities in a complex interplay of technology, society and culture. The Juniorprofessorship for Media Culture attempts to tackle these issues in an interdisciplinary way, employing cultural theory, media studies and sociology to arrive at a better understanding of how we all are engaged in shaping our realities.
Welcome to our page. Please refer to the right frame for further information on the topic and the activities of our team.
Media Culture | Introductory Readings
BA | MA | Topics
Marian Adolf, CV
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About the Little Girl that Beat Her Sister
Go, go, my naughty girl, and kiss
Your little sister dear;
I must not have such things as this,
And noisy quarrels here.
What! little children scratch and fight,
That ought to be so mild;
Oh! Mary, it's a shocking sight
To see an angry child.
I can't imagine, for my part,
The reason for your folly;
She did not do you any hurt
By playing with your dolly.
See, see, the little tears that run
Fast from her watery eye:
Come, my sweet innocent, have done,
'Twill do no good to cry.
Go, Mary, wipe her tears away,
And make it up with kisses:
And never turn a pretty play
To such a pet as this is.
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IMF Special Reports: "They Should Have Known Greece Was Insolvent"
Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, has some stinging criticism of the European Union's handling of the Greek crisis.
By Steve Rosenbush
Europes banking system is on the verge of melting down, as the ECB and the IMF struggle to contain the crisis that began in Greece and has spread throughout most of the continent and the world. Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and political science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been a forceful critic of those institutions. Eichengreen, whose most recent book is Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar, has argued that the policymakers have been in denial about the depth of the financial and economic crisis. Here Eichengreen himself a former senior policy advisor to the IMF explains why he believes Europe is once again at the precipice and how to pull it back from the brink. Here are highlights of his conversation with Institutional Investor contributing writer Steve Rosenbush.
Institutional Investor: How critical is the debt crisis in Europe and is world political and economic leadership managing it properly?
David Eichengreen: As I put it in a recent article, Europe is at the precipice. The survival of the euro and the European Union itself are at stake. So far, the policy response has been ineffective. (Ineffective is the most polite description I can think of.) To address the crisis, three things must be done, immediately. Most important is that European banks be recapitalized. There is absolutely no doubt that Europe has a bank funding problem. So far, the euro area has preferred to deny the existence of that problem.....
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|Work-based Learning Endorsement Conceptual Framework and Program Overview|
Candidates must meet the following criteria:
The data and times tell us that the need for high-quality work-based learning experiences for students is of utmost importance. First, data from a 2008 study by the Educational Testing Service and the Southern Regional Education Board reveal that students who experience more intensive work-based learning supports have higher mathematics and science achievement upon exiting high school (www.sreb.org). With the current struggling economic climate and difficult employment environment, initiatives such as the Georgia Work Ready Initiative from the Governor’s Office of Workforce Development are attempting to provide citizens with high-level employment opportunities (www.gaworkready.org). The content contained in the proposed endorsement program is in concert with these study results and initiatives—responding to the need for more students leaving high school prepared for high-level technical employment.
The proposed program for the WBL Coordinator provides endorsement certification. Its purpose is to prepare candidates to effectively implement a school-wide Career Related Education model including work-based learning placements in all CTAE classes for middle/secondary CTAE programs. The WBL endorsement program allows individuals holding an existing Level 4 or higher teaching certificate in any field to add this credential.
The program is based on the Georgia PSC Rule 505-3-.67 and supplements requirements in Rule 505-3-.01. The program also ensures all candidates meet the 24 Work-based Learning Standards set forth by the Career, Technical, and Agricultural Education/Georgia Department of Education Standards for Program Improvement. Candidates meet these standards through course work and related field experiences. This program prepares the candidate to work as a WBL Coordinator for all CTAE fields. Candidates are admitted during the summer (semester) and take the approved program courses as a cohort group.
During the final course of the program, candidates in the WBL Endorsement Program are coordinating their school-wide programs full-time. The endorsement program experiences are set up to ensure that the candidates have multiple opportunities for applying coursework within their own context. Assignments in courses one and two integrate field-based assignments that candidates apply in their own school site. For example, candidates learn about work-based learning placements in course two, and then employ that practice in the field. In the year-long field supervised internship (course three) instructors visit candidates at their school site and at work-sites where WBL students are placed. Instructors observe candidates throughout the internship, and also have them engage in online teacher-generated discussion groups via an online course management system. Additionally, candidates keep a weekly teaching log/journal to reflect on their experiences and to look for trends in their practice.
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Stuff about early Hanna-Barbera cartoons
“Hello, all. I’m Yowp. You’ll remember me from the Yogi Bear cartoon Foxy Hound-Dog and a few others. I’m the dog that says “Yowp! Yowp!” all the time. And nothing else. However, I’ll be talking more here.
If you talk about Hanna-Barbera cartoons, you’ll find many people who have a fondness for the earliest half-hour shows… The tremendous voices of Daws Butler. The clever writing of Mike Maltese. The (at times) imaginative cost-cutting drawing by some very talented former M.G.M. artists. There are even those who gush about the stock melodies from Capitol Hi-Q and Langlois Filmusic libraries in the audio background.
So, we’re here to talk about them. There’ll be some reviews of cartoons, bits of news and commentary. No Scooby here (cheering). The posts may be infrequent but, hey, I only said “Yowp” over and over again for 50 years, so what do you expect?”
latest installment of Simon’s Cat
Animation was the format of choice for children’s television in the 1960s, a decade in which children’s programming became almost entirely animated. Growing up in that period, I tended to take for granted the distortions and strange bodies of these entities. These Icons are usually grotesquely distorted from the human form from which they derive.
I decided to take a select few of these popular characters and render their skeletal systems as I imagine they might resemble if one truly had eye sockets half the size of its head, or fingerless-hands, or feet comprising 60% of its body mass.
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NEW PRODUCT – PN532 NFC/RFID controller breakout board – v1.0. The PN532 is the most popular NFC chip, and is what is embedded in pretty much every phone or device that does NFC. It can pretty much do it all, such as read and write to tags and cards, communicate with phones (say for payment processing), and ‘act’ like a NFC tag. If you want to do any sort of embedded NFC work, this is the chip you’ll want to use!
NFC (Near Field Communications) is a way for two devices very close to each other to communicate. Sort of like a very short range bluetooth that doesn’t require authentication. It is an extension of RFID, so anything you can do with RFID you can do with NFC. You can do more stuff with NFC as well, such as communicate bi-directionally with cell phones
Because it can read and write tags, you can always just use this for RFID-tag projects. We carry a few different tags that work great with this chip. It can also work with any other NFC/RFID Type 1 thru 4 tag (and of course all the other NXP MiFare type tags)
The PN532 is also very flexible, you can use 3.3V TTL UART at any baud rate, I2C or SPI to communicate with it. This chip is also strongly supported by libnfc
Comes with: the PN532 breakout board including a tuned 13.56MHz stripline antenna, 0.1″ header, 2 jumpers/shunts and a 4050 level shifter chip. We also toss in a MiFare Classic 1K card to start you off!
We don’t have a detailed tutorial up yet but we do have a quickstart guide that will demonstrate the SPI interface on an Arduino and how to read the 4-byte ID burned into the card.
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by Rebecca Lefton and Andrew Light
In 2010 the U.S. launched the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) as a collaborative effort among governments, the private sector, and other stakeholders to promote policies, programs, and technical solutions that will accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy.
An outgrowth of the U.S.-led Major Economies Forum — which brings together the major carbon polluters in the world in a smaller forum than the U.N. climate negotiations — the CEM has evolved into a global alliance of 23 countries joined in a variety of partnerships to advance energy efficiency, increase renewable energy, and provide modern energy access solutions to 10 million people by 2015.
Last week the CEM met in London and had its most successful meeting to date, greatly expanding a number of its initiatives on technology cooperation. This alone would have signaled a successful meeting. But the parties went even further, joining forces with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All (SE4ALL) initiative. SE4ALL has emerged as the key goal for the upcoming Rio+20 meeting in June, an event marking the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit that gave birth to the U.N. framework conventions on climate change, biological diversity, and desertification.
Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All goals are to (1) ensure universal access to electricity by 2030, (2), double the rate of improvement in energy efficiency by 2030, and (3) double the share of renewable energy in the global energy mix by 2030. While some in the environment and development community had doubted the U.N.’s ability to move this new platform over the finish line in Rio, this show of support from the CEM parties greatly increases the chances of success by adding a necessary level of detail for how the goals would move forward.
Advances in the Clean Energy Ministerial
With parties representing 90 percent of global clean energy investment and 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the CEM is essential for accelerating smart policy and market conditions for a faster transition to a clean energy economy. Developing countries hold 50 percent of capacity for building out clean energy, but more than 70 percent of growth in clean energy investment since 2000 has been in OECD countries. Global investment in clean energy reached $260 billion in 2011; however, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that $5 trillion is needed by 2020 to avoid a dangerous rise in greenhouse gases. According to the IEA we are on track for a 6°C [11°F] rise in temperature under current policies.
This week the leaders of the CEM — primarily represented by energy and technology ministers from the world’s largest economies — built on the progress of eleven ongoing initiatives to remove barriers to the adoption of clean energy technology.
Countries launched the 21st Century Power Partnership that will harness demand-side management and high volume renewable energy generation through smart grid technologies, as part of the 20-country International Smart Grid Action Network. The partnership will provide a forum for policy sharing and technical tools for regulators and the private sector to better integrate renewable energy into larger electricity grids. In addition, the Smart Grid International Research Facility Network will help to vet smart grid technologies between the R&D and commercialization stage.
The on-going Super-efficient Equipment and Appliance Deployment (SEAD) initiative announced several new developments which should accelerate efforts to improve energy efficiency. This included a new effort to shift to more efficient lighting technologies led by India, in partnership with the $20 million UN Environment Program’s en.lighten initiative, which could reduce global electricity consumption by 2.5 percent. This is critical for the overall CEM goal to avoid the need for 650 mid-sides power plants reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 11 billion tons from 2010 to 2030, all while saving billions of dollars.
The CEM also announced the Global Lighting and Energy Access Partnership to provide modern, low-cost energy options for the world’s poor, expanding on the existing Solar and LED Energy Access Initiative (SLED) led by the US and Italy and now joined by the World Bank, the International finance Corporation, the UN Foundation, the Energy and Resources Institute, the African Development Bank, the Global Environment Facility, the UN Development Program, and Japan’s Ministry of Trade & Industry. SLED has already helped facilitate the sale of 500,000 off-grid lighting systems in Africa helping Lighting Africa provide modern reliable off-grid lighting to 2.5 million people by 2012. Lighting India aims to provide modern lighting services to 2 million people by 2015. These initiatives will advance the overall goal of CEM member governments to expand energy access to 10 million people by 2015.
A year ago at the second CEM, Australia and the United States have taken the lead on the creation of a new internet-based technical assistance project to provide low-cost high-impact support to governments implementing clean energy and efficiency policies. Now in partnership with U.N. Energy the Clean Energy Solutions Center has expanded as of this April to a $15 million project which has so far had over 10,000 users from 150 countries. In London the ClimateWorks Foundation announced a $1 million in-kind commitment to support for this project over three years.
And recognizing that clean energy solutions that include women will ensure a faster and stronger a transition to a clean energy economy that is stronger, sustainable, and equitable, CEM leaders advanced a Women in Clean Energy program as part of the Clean Energy Education and Empowerment initiative to encourage women to join the clean energy field. Women are underrepresented (and underpaid) in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education programs, and even more so in the STEM professional workforce.
Sustainable Energy for All
The CEM commitments are well positioned to support Moon’s Sustainable Energy For All Initiative. The principle U.S. players overlap on both. The CEM was the brainchild of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and Assistant Secretary of Energy for Policy and International Affairs David Sandalow. Chu is the U.S. representative on the U.N. High-Level Group for Sustainable Energy for All and he is supported by Sandalow and Carlos Pascual, Special Envoy and Coordinator for International Energy Affairs at the U.S. State Department.
A helpful way of understanding the three SE4ALL goals on energy poverty, efficiency, and renewable energy is as a continuation of the 2000 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). One persistent critique of the MDGs has been that there were no MDG for energy hindering the goals on health, education, women’s empowerment, and the environment. Given that energy poverty is both an accelerator of overall poverty and a hurdle for moving out of poverty this is a major conceptual and practical flaw in the MDGs.
One in five people (1.3 billion), mostly in sub-Saharan Africa or Asia lack modern, reliable electricity. Twice that number, 40% of the world’s population, relies on wood, coal, charcoal or animal waste to cook their food using traditional cook stoves, which emit black carbon pollution that is dangerous for human health and a major contributor to global warming. Replacing outdated cook stoves would save 800,000 lives annually.
The IEA estimates the cost to achieving the goal of eliminating energy poverty would be less than $50 billion per year. While the average family savings (especially from the cooking fuel switch) would be $34 billion per year generating an economic return, according to the WHO, of $105 billion per year. The goal on energy efficiency are similarly cost effective. McKinsey estimates that investing $170 billion annually in energy efficiency will generate an internal rate of return of 17 percent, producing savings of $900 billion per year. Meeting this goal would also reduce global energy consumption by 14 percent by 2030 avoiding the construction of approximately 1,300 mid-size power plants.
The newly released Sustainable Energy Action For all Global Action Agenda outlines a course of action and specific objectives for governments, private sector and civil society for reaching the goal of sustainable energy for all by 2030.
Finishing up this week, Charles Holliday, Bank of America Chairman and Co-Chair of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Group on Sustainable Energy for All had this to say about the meeting: “The CEM commitments to action announced today in support of achieving Sustainable Energy for All are terrific examples of the power of partnership. Providing sustainable energy for all by 2030 is an ambitious, yet achievable goal. But it will only be achieved through collaborative action by the private sector, governments and civil society.”
The final step for launching SE4ALL will be at the Rio+20 meeting in Brazil June 20-22nd.
Rebecca Lefton is a Policy Analyst and Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow working on international climate policy at the Center for American Progress.
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About This Blog
Since you're reading a blog called Car Chase, I assume you know that I'm not asking about a place in California. Some of you may know that a Berkeley is an esoteric British sports car made in small numbers about fifty years ago. These cute, little three and four wheel convertibles were powered by two and three cylinder motorcycle engines. Due to their diminutive size and very light weight, they were very popular and reasonably successful in the early sports car racing scene. They still have a good following to this day, although collector values are still relatively low.
The reason I bring all this up is that, as a former Berkeley owner, I occasionally do a Google search to see what's happening with them. The other day, I found a blog which chronicled a complete, professional restoration of a lucky example. As I mentioned before, Berkeley values aren't exactly at the top of the collector market so very few, if any, are professionally restored. What's even more interesting is the shop which did this wonderful work is right here in Northeast Ohio. I checked out the website for Pete's Custom Coachbuilding ( www.petescustomcoachbuilding.com ) and was amazed to see everything from micro cars to Indy racers to pre-war Packards in their portfolio.
After checking out some of the videos on their website, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HWfsHNernAA) I was heartened to see that Pete and his crew are a group of young guys practicing an old craft. Their approach to their work and passion for doing things right seem to bear fruit in excellent results. It's great to have another excellent resource in our area for anyone considering a project with any type of collectable vehicle. I can't wait to check out Pete's operation personally. If you have experience with any other shops, feel free to comment below.
- 2012 (28)
- 2011 (25)
- 2010 (28)
- 2009 (60)
- 2008 (36)
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śrī śrī guru gaurāṅga jayataḥ!
Year-4, Issue 8Posted: 17 September 2011
Dedicated tonitya-līlā praviṣṭa oṁ viṣṇupāda
Śrī Śrīmad Bhakti Prajñāna Keśava Gosvāmī Mahārāja
Inspired by and under the guidance ofnitya-līlā praviṣṭa oṁ viṣṇupāda
Śrī Śrīmad Bhaktivedānta Nārāyaṇa Gosvāmī Mahārāja
Accepting Disciples – Becoming a Disciple
by Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda
Question 1: Who will attain perfection (siddhī)?
Answer: Only those who follow the path of descending knowledge will attain perfection. Logical arguments are never permanently established, whereas the process of hearing from a bona fide source has been established since the beginning of time as the authentic process for achieving perfection. Only those who are engaged in hari-kīrtana twenty-four hours a day are able to attain perfection (siddhī).
_____________________* The process of acquiring knowledge by hearing from a bona fide guru in the succession of authentic spiritual masters is known as avarohapantha, or the descending path.
Question 2: Is it proper to consider many different people equal to your spiritual master?
Answer: No. A disciple should never disobey the spiritual master nor should he ever deride his transcendental message (śrauta-vāṇī), which has descended through the succession of authentic spiritual masters. He should not dishonour the spiritual master by considering many teachers to be as worshipful as him.
My śrī gurudeva is an endless reservoir of mercy. One drop of that mercy is capable of drowning me in the infinite ocean of transcendental ecstasy. Apart from this – that is, apart from receiving shelter at the lotus feet of the Supreme Absolute Truth Vrajendra-nandana Śrī Kṛṣṇa, who is one without a second – there is no other genuine welfare for the living entity.
Śrīla Gurudeva used to tell me with great compassion, “You should give up your pride in your scholarly knowledge, in your purity, in your nobility and the like, and come to me. You do not have to go anywhere else. Whatever house, palace or mansion you must have; whatever intelligence, genius or talent you need; and whatever self-restraint or worldly renunciation you require, you will get; just come to me. Let me have the house, the palace, the scholarly qualifications – you should not chase after these things with such intelligence. You should never think that attaining such things is the purpose of life as other, common people do.
Question 3: What are the activities of saintly personalities?
Answer: The duty of saintly personalities (sādhus) is to completely destroy the demoniac mentality of the living entities, which has developed over many lifetimes. Sādhu means one who stands at the sacrificial altar ready to execute the sensuous, goat-like inclinations of the conditioned human beings with the sharp blade of his words. The sādhu never flatters anyone. If the sādhu is given to adulation and flattery, he is not our well-wisher; rather he is our enemy.
Vaiṣṇavas have no inclination to stay in bad company (asat-saṅga). Nevertheless, simply to bestow welfare, they approach those who are implicated in bad association, and through the weapon of their words make them abandon their demoniac propensities, thus bringing them into good association (sat-saṅga).
Question 4: What is śrī vigraha?
Answer: Śrī vigraha is the deity incarnation of the Supreme Lord (arca-avatāra). He is not a sculpture; rather He is Śrī Vrajendra-nandana Himself. One should perceive the deity and not a statue. Unlike the conditioned soul who inhabits a temporary body, the body and soul of the deity are non-different. The form of śrī vigraha is sat-cit-ānanda – full of eternity, knowledge and bliss – and of all the incarnations of the Supreme Lord, He is the most merciful.
Question 5: What is the topmost form of worship?
Answer: Among all goals (sādhya) and their respective means of attainment (sādhana), service to Śrī Kṛṣṇa, the darling son of Śrī Nanda Mahārāja, in the mood of conjugal love (mādhurya-rasa) is both the topmost goal and the topmost means to attain it. The very pinnacle of all forms of worship is to serve Him.
It is not that the damsels of Vraja accepted Him as their most beloved because they were enchanted by His opulence, for the damsels of Vraja are not even slightly attracted to that feature of Him. Rather, they have spontaneous love for Him. Their only desire is for Śrī Kṛṣṇa to be happy, and it is solely that immense, selfless desire that caused them to accept Śrī Kṛṣṇa as their most beloved.
Question 6: What is the easiest way to achieve a tranquil mind?
Answer: The mind can only be restrained by performing śrī kṛṣṇa nāma-kīrtana. When one follows the path of karma, jñāna, yoga and so forth, the mind may temporarily become stable, but it inevitably returns to a reactionary state; thus one falls again into an ocean of transience and agitation.
Question 7: Is it correct to accept disciples? Have you not accepted disciples?
Answer: We should not accept disciples; rather, we must become a disciple. That is, we must constantly remain engaged in serving śrī guru and Śrī Kṛṣṇa. The Vaiṣṇavas (devotees of Viṣṇu, or Śrī Kṛṣṇa) see śrī guru in every object. If we become proud and see ourselves as a Vaiṣṇava, then it will no longer be possible for us to serve śrī guru and the Vaiṣṇavas.
“I never do anything of my own volition, and I never will. I only do what Śrī Bhagavān wishes me to do.” Only one who thinks this way, free from the false pride of being the doer and constantly engaged in serving the Supreme Lord, can lead the living entities to their true well-being by awakening in them the inclination to serve Śrī Kṛṣṇa. Hypocritically making a show by declaring “I am not the doer” is not enough. In fact, it is imperative to truly realize that in every situation, I am being impelled to act by the Supreme Lord.
I have not accepted anyone as my disciple. All those whom you consider to be my disciples are actually my guruvarga.
Question 8: How can we enter in the realm of bhajana?
Answer: To associate with someone means to accept something from them. I only accept what I have received from my śrī gurudeva; I do not accept anything from anyone else. I do not engage in any activity outside of the instructions of Śrī Gurudeva, just to fulfil the intentions of others.
We should not accept anything from someone for our own use. Whatever someone may offer us with love and devotion to be used in the service of śrī guru and Śrī Kṛṣṇa, we should accept respectfully and use it exclusively to serve the Supreme Lord. This alone grants us welfare.
We will only gain entry into the realm of bhajana when we become aware of this secret: we should never look upon any object with the desire to enjoy it ourselves; rather, we should use every object to serve the Supreme Lord.
Question 9: Who is the true object of all service (sevya)?
Answer: Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the sole object of everyone’s service. He alone is the master of everything and everyone. He is the sole friend of everyone, the only son of every parent, and the only beloved of every girl. When Śrī Kṛṣṇa becomes manifest to someone as their worshipful master in order to accept their service, they automatically give up their service to everyone else.
Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the cause of all causes. He is the source of all-pervasive spirit (brahma), of the Supersoul within all beings and within every atom (Paramātmā), and He is the source of all forms of Godhead (viṣṇu-tattva).
Translated by the Rays of The Harmonist teamfrom Śrīla Prabhupādera Upadeśāmṛta Questions re-numbered for this on-line presentation
_____________________Śrīla Prabhupadera Upadeśāmṛta is a compilation of Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura Prabhupāda’s instructions in question-and-answer form.
24 May, 2013Special on-line Edition:On Nṛsiṁha Caturdaśī 29 May 2013Issue: Year 6, Issue 4:To be Announced
Rays of The Harmonist Monthly Mailing List
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Arts, Culture and Heritage
Thursday, 03 March 2011 00:00
The ancient city of Guimarães in Portugal's northern Minho region will take center stage next year as Europe's Capital of Culture, along with the Slovenian city of Maribor. More than 41 million euros have been invested in the event's program, plus a further 70 million euros for local urban development. Celebrated as the cradle of the Portuguese nation, Guimarães played an important role in many of the events that led to the country's independence, as well as witnessing the birth of the first king of Portugal, Afonso Henriques I. As well, the distinctive outline of the 10th-century castle, the city's most important tourist attraction, appears on the Portuguese coat of arms.
Tuesday, 01 March 2011 00:00
Every year the ancient
One of the most symbolic traditions of Monsanto is the Festival of the Holy Cross, held in May, to commemorate the resistance to a long history of sieges: the women carry to the top of the castle typical rag-dolls (known as "marafonas") and clay jars, full of flowers, are thrown from the walls. The festival dates back to 2nd century BC when Roman troops had the population of the village besieged in the castle for six years. Out of food, the population tossed the last of its supplies from the walls to show the Roman’s that they had plenty more, or to tried to fool them into thinking that was the case- and it worked!
In 1938 Monsanto was voted the "most Portuguese village in
Tuesday, 01 March 2011 00:00
Wednesday, 16 February 2011 00:00CSO’2011 International Conference, an event which will turn Lisbon into a hub for professional artists and creators specializing in a range of visual arts disciplines. Scheduled for April 2011 at the Fine Arts School at the University of Lisbon, the congress will centre on artists’ interpretation of their colleagues’ work. The meeting will focus on the work of the Iberian artistic community, with Portuguese, Spanish, Galician and Catalan being the main languages spoken.
Saturday, 12 February 2011 00:00
The Gulbenkian Foundation that now enjoys the status of national monument is leading architectural work both nationally and internationally. A Valmor Award winner in 1975, it was designed by architects Ruy Athouguia, Alberto Pessoa, Pedro Cid, Gonçalo Ribeiro Telles Barreto, and Antonio Viana. The Sagrado Coração de Jesus Church, on Avenida da Liberdade, is a landmark building of 20th century Portuguese architecture and Valmor Architectural Award winner in 1975. The Science Faculty Botanical Gardens is known for its development and teaching of natural sciences, especially botany. Opened in 1878, this garden features several tropical species, from New Zealand, Australia, China, Japan and South America, hosting one of the most valuable collections of botanical species in Portugal. The Battle of Aljubarrota, fought between the Portuguese and Spaniards on a plateau between Boutaca Bridge, in the Batalha municipality to the north, and Chão da Feira, Porto de Mos municipality to the south, represents a decisive moment in Portugal's affirmation as an independent kingdom
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MicroRNA (miRNA) expression is known to be deregulated in ovarian carcinomas. However, limited data is available about the miRNA expression pattern for the benign or borderline ovarian tumors as well as differential miRNA expression pattern associated with histological types, grades or clinical stages in ovarian carcinomas. We defined patterns of microRNA expression in tissues from normal, benign, borderline, and malignant ovarian tumors and explored the relationship between frequently deregulated miRNAs and clinicopathologic findings, response to therapy, survival, and association with Her-2/neu status in ovarian carcinomas.
We measured the expression of nine miRNAs (miR-181d, miR-30a-3p, miR-30c, miR-30d, miR-30e-3p, miR-368, miR-370, miR-493-5p, miR-532-5p) in 171 formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded ovarian tissue blocks as well as six normal human ovarian surface epithelial (HOSE) cell lines using Taqman-based real-time PCR assays. Her-2/neu overexpression was assessed in ovarian carcinomas (n = 109 cases) by immunohistochemistry analysis.
Expression of four miRNAs (miR-30c, miR-30d, miR-30e-3p, miR-370) was significantly different between carcinomas and benign ovarian tissues as well as between carcinoma and borderline tissues. An additional three miRNAs (miR-181d, miR-30a-3p, miR-532-5p) were significantly different between borderline and carcinoma tissues. Expression of miR-532-5p was significantly lower in borderline than in benign tissues. Among ovarian carcinomas, expression of four miRNAs (miR-30a-3p, miR-30c, miR-30d, miR-30e-3p) was lowest in mucinous and highest in clear cell samples. Expression of miR-30a-3p was higher in well-differentiated compared to poorly differentiated tumors (P = 0.02), and expression of miR-370 was higher in stage I/II compared to stage III/IV samples (P = 0.03). In multivariate analyses, higher expression of miR-181d, miR-30c, miR-30d, and miR-30e-3p was associated with significantly better disease-free or overall survival. Finally, lower expression of miR-30c, miR-30d, miR-30e-3p and miR-532-5p was significantly associated with overexpression of Her-2/neu.
Aberrant expression of miRNAs is common in ovarian tumor suggesting involvement of miRNA in ovarian tumorigenesis. They are associated with histology, clinical stage, survival and oncogene expression in ovarian carcinoma.
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Martha and Mark are a married couple in their late 60s. They are concerned because Mark’s pension will dry up when he passes away, which would force Martha to drastically reduce her standard of living. Although their assets probably will be sufficient to support Martha for the rest of her life, they do not want to tap them unless absolutely necessary. Right now, the pension is substantial enough to supply most of their needs, leaving their other assets to grow and eventually pass to their beloved children.
Is there a way to insure against the risk of Mark’s early death and the loss of his pension income without breaking the bank on a high-cost permanent life insurance policy on Mark’s life?
How about a reversionary annuity?
Life insurance is often the go-to product in situations similar to Martha and Mark’s, but in many cases, insurance is out of the question. A term policy will not work because it will lapse, and a permanent policy may not be feasible because the premiums are normally high. And life insurance may be out of the question because of the insured’s health or age.
A reversionary annuity may be just what a couple like Martha and Mark need to make up the income shortfall that will come after Mark’s death. Reversionary annuities can be useful in any situation where one person will require regular income after the death of another, for instance:
- Where the payout on a spouse’s annuity or pension pays out only over his lifetime.
- Where the spouse who is likely to live longer will be unable to live comfortably without the other spouse’s Social Security or other payments that cease at the time of death.
- Where a disabled child will depend on a parent for lifetime income.
- Where a low-cost alternative to a buy-sell agreement for business owners is needed.
What exactly is a reversionary annuity?
A reversionary annuity is essentially a life insurance policy coupled with an immediate annuity. When the insured dies, the death benefit is used to fund an immediate annuity on the beneficiary’s life. Unlike a life insurance policy, the product offers only a predetermined life income option for the beneficiary; there is no lump-sum payout at the death of the insured.
Because of its low cost when compared to permanent insurance, reversionary insurance may also make sense for individuals with medical problems or a shorter life expectancy that makes life insurance unaffordable. For older couples, a reversionary annuity may be affordable even if a life insurance policy is not, because the beneficiary’s relatively short life expectancy decreases the cost of the policy due to the likelihood that it will not pay out over an extended period.
Riders, benefits and options
Reversionary annuities are generally inflexible; if the insured’s or beneficiary’s needs change, they are out of luck. In their most basic form, reversionary annuities simply pay a fixed monthly sum to the beneficiary after the insured’s death. If the beneficiary dies before the insured, payments into the product cease and the insured is left without value or benefits from the policy.
However, there are a number of riders and options that can vary that standard. For instance, instead of a “fixed monthly sum,” an inflation-protection option can be purchased for an additional premium. One such option, the “3 percent increasing option” increases the monthly payout by 3 percent on every policy anniversary date. Another option, the “5 percent increasing option” increases the monthly payout by 5 percent on each anniversary of the first monthly benefit payment to the beneficiary.
There are also options for ensuring that payments will continue at the insured’s death even if the beneficiary pre-deceases the insured. A premium return option will return premium payments to the insured if the beneficiary predeceases the insured. Simultaneous death benefit and accelerated first-year benefit riders are also available.
Taxation of distributions from a reversionary annuity
Although one source claims that payments received from a reversionary annuity “may receive favorable tax treatment as survivor income,” it is safer to assume that payouts will be taxed as any other annuity payment. Part of the payout will be untaxed as a return of principal; the remainder of each payment will be taxed.
The question remains: What is the principal amount? Is it the amount paid into the product during its “life insurance phase?” Or do we use the value of the annuity that will provide an income stream for the remainder of the surviving spouse’s lifetime?
An in-depth discussion of the taxation of reversionary annuities is beyond the scope of this article, but the answer probably is the latter; the return of principal component of each payout is based on the value of the annuity at the time of the first spouse’s death.
Comparison with other products
Reversionary annuities generally can be purchased for about half the price of a permanent life insurance product. But that discount comes with a price: Unlike a permanent life policy, the product dies with the beneficiary, leaving no value.
How do reversionary annuities compare with other longevity-oriented products? For instance, longevity insurance is a deferred annuity with a very late start date. A longevity annuity doesn’t make payments to the annuitant until he or she reaches a particular age—typically 85.
The contract then pays a fixed amount on a monthly basis for the remaining life of the annuitant. Both products offer competitive rates because they pay out in only a limited set of circumstances—allowing carriers to offer the products at competitive rates. Both products serve one very particular purpose, ensuring lifetime income sufficiency.
Why can carriers price reversionary annuities lower than “equivalent” life insurance policies? There are a couple of reasons. Unlike a life insurance policy, which requires the carrier to make a large cash outlay at the time of the insured’s death, the payout on a reversionary annuity is made over time, in monthly installments.
Also, as mentioned earlier, a reversionary annuity will never pay out if the beneficiary predeceases the insured. And because the beneficiary cannot be changed, the company has a very good idea of how often the distribution phase of the product will be activated and how much the product can expect to pay out for a particular insured/beneficiary combination.
The core difference between the products is the event that they’re protecting against. In the case of the reversionary annuity, the product is designed to ensure that the beneficiary does not suffer income loss when the insured dies.
In contrast, longevity annuities are suited for cases where your client is concerned about outliving his or her income because of an unexpectedly long lifespan. Despite their differences, both products insure against longevity risk. Compared to permanent life insurance, reversionary annuities are significantly less expensive and don’t require the beneficiary to manage the death benefit payout to create lifetime income sufficiency.
Each product’s suitability will depend on the type of longevity risk your client faces, their ability to qualify for traditional permanent life insurance, and their capacity to fund the products.
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As with the rape of women, the rape of men is nota crime solely of sexual motivation but also andoften primarily one of aggression; Sexual assaulttreatment centers report 5.7 to 10 percent of theirclientele are males. Male rape is generally thoughtto be more underreported than female rape.According to the 1996 National Crime VictimizationSurvey, more than two-thirds of sexual assaultvictims in the United States never report. This iseven more prevalent among male victims. Most donot report their assaults, nor do they receivemedical attention or counseling.
In one study only 15 percent of all rape victims everreport the rape to the police. Only 2 of 22 male sexualassault victims studied by had reported their sexualassault to the police. The remaining 20 cited fear ofrejection, disbelief, and stigmatization as their reasonsfor not reporting. Most men never consider the possibilitythey could be raped; therefore, when it happens to them,it can be devastating and stigmatizing. Male rape victimsare less likely to report than women because of theextreme embarrassment they typically experience andbecause they fear being misunderstood as homosexual.For this reason, community education and crisisintervention serve to correct misconceptions about malerape are of critical importance.
The incidence of male rape is difficult to estimate. Asurvey of 336 agencies respond to the needs of sexualassault victims found just over half of these agenciesserve male victims. The majority of men seen for sexualassault were white (85 percent) and heterosexual (8percent). Most of the assaults occurred between ages 16and 30 (86 percent) and involved a threat to the victim’ssafety through physical force (60 percent) or physicalthreat (68 percent) or occurred while the victim wasintoxicated (40 percent). Slightly less than half theassaults involved weapons. Most of the offenders wereknown to their victims (69 percent), and nearly 60percent of the assaults involved only one offender. Therapists were generally male (94 percent), white (78percent), and perceived by the victim to be heterosexual(90 percent).
After the assault, 1 in 5 male victimssought medical treatment; however,only 23 percent of these menrevealed the sexual nature of theassault to medical personnel. Lessthan 15 percent reported the sexualassault to the police, and less than 2percent of these assaults werereported in the media.
In a review of several studies of male rape victims, reports50 to 83 percent of male victims were raped by only oneassailant, most victims knew their assailant, weapons wereused in 9 to 25 percent of assaults, victims were threatenedin 26 to 100 percent of the assaults, male victims wereinjured in 25 to 60 percent of the assaults, and most sexualassaults of males did not involve drugs or alcohol. Rates ofweapon use, stranger assault, and injury were greater instudies of men who reported to emergency departmentsthan in studies of men who were sampled in communityclinics or who responded to newspaper ads. These findingsmay indicate men are more likely to report a sexual assaultin the context of seeking treatment for other injuries. It isimportant to train police and emergency personnel to askmen who report having been robbed or who present fortreatment of physical injuries if they were sexually assaultedin any way
In another study, reviews of the emergency departmentrecords of 74 male and, 1,380 female victims of sexualassault who received care from SANE’S. Most victims inthis study reported the assault to the police (89 percentof men and 91 percent of women). One-fourth of bothmale and female victims reported a history of priorincest. More than 75 percent of male and female victimsstated they feared for their lives during the assault;however, 58 percent of women versus 40 percent of menreported being harmed during the assault. Male victimswere significantly more likely to have been raped bymore than one assailant, and only 48 percent of malesand 46 percent of females reported being raped by anacquaintance.
Most studies confirm male sexualassault victims are less likely thanfemale victims to sustain physicalinjuries suggests submitting to asexual assault may seem inexplicableor shameful to male survivors.
Erection and Ejaculation duringSexual Assault In a study of 5 men who have been sexually assaulted, it is reported 18 percent of the victims experienced ejaculation during the assault. Having an erection or ejaculating during a sexual assault can upset and confuse a victim. Many people (including significant others, police, juries, judges, and attorneys) share the misconception a man cannot obtain an erection if he is frightened or anxious. This is not true.
In a review of sexual response literature, thephysiological mechanism of any emotionalresponse (whether anger, fear, or pain) may beone of sexual response. They point to evidenceof high levels of physiological arousal can leadto involuntary erection and ejaculation. It isdocumented, male victims’ ability to experienceerection and ejaculation during sexualvictimization. Studies show when a man isrectally raped, pressure on the prostate canproduce erection and even ejaculation.
When victims have a sexual response to anassault, they often feel as if their body hasbetrayed them. Victims benefit from hearing this isa common physiological response. It may reassurethem to know their response was out of theircontrol, in much the same way as tears would bethe inevitable physiological response to a slicedonion held under their nose; they would cryregardless of their determination not to. Afterbeing sexually assaulted by another man,heterosexual men may struggle with issuessurrounding sexual orientation and preference.Gay men may feel they were targeted on accountof their orientation or preference. Fear andconfusion can be allayed by explaining the sexualresponse is a physiological reaction to pressure onthe prostate or to fear, anxiety, or pain.
Sexual Preference/Orientation ofRapists Victim gender is not an indicator of the offender’s sexual orientation or preference. In a study of convicted male sex offenders who raped men, at the time of their offense, all the men were actively engaged in consenting sexual encounters or relationships, with 9 percent reporting those encounters were almost exclusively with other men, and 32 percent reporting sexual activity with both men and women. In one study, 27 percent of the convicted sex offenders reported they confined their consenting sexual activity to women. Half of them were married.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorderin Male Survivors Male victims of sexual assault experience post-traumatic stress reactions similar to those observed among female victims, with fear being most commonly reported, followed by depression or thoughts of suicide, anger, somatic problems, sexual dysfunction, and disturbances in peer relationships. In a study comparing male victims with female victims seen in the emergency department, males experience slightly more depression and hostility than females immediately following the assault.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorderin Male Survivors Men need the same level of crisis intervention and follow-up care as women; however, males may be less likely than females to seek and receive support from family and friends. Like women, men need to be able to recount the sexual assault in a safe and supportive environment. One study points out male victims may not profit as much as women from social support, most likely because society emphasizes self-reliance in our socialization of men. The ability of male victims to seek support will vary according to the level of stigmatization they feel, the number of supportive relationships they have, the circumstances of the rape, and the sensitivity of care they receive in the emergency department or rape crisis center. Men may experience difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions other than those of anger and aggression and may need particular help doing so in a healthy way.
Responding to Male Victims Advocates/counselors serve male victims well by taking the time to listen carefully to their account of the rape and their immediate concerns.
Responding to Male Victims In a study to determine the preferred gender for the advocate, it was found half of female rape victims prefer to be seen by a woman, and the other half have no preference. Of the male victims, however, 100 percent indicated they felt more comfortable speaking with a woman immediately after the assault. It is helpful to describe common reactions men have after being sexually assaulted and to stress men do get raped regardless of who they are, what they were doing, or how they look. Men may worry they appear too effeminate, and this caused the assault. Gay men may wonder if the offender assaulted them because of their sexual orientation, and therefore they may struggle with self-blame. All men need to be reassured their sexual orientation, appearance, and sexual preference had nothing to do with their being raped. Men are susceptible to the same techniques used by rapists to gain control over female victims (the use of weapons, entrapment, intimidation, threats, and coercion).
Responding to Male Victims One important function of the immediate crisis response is to help the victim decide whom he wants to tell. While support is critical, some within the victim’s circle may respond in a way to further damage his concept of self. Helping family and friends understand the dynamics of male rape also is essential to the victim’s recovery. The most important thing significant others can do for male victims is to believe them and try to understand what they are experiencing. Coming to grips with the fact any man could be raped is threatening to many people; they find comfort in believing men can always protect themselves and others.
Responding to Male Victims The majority of people will need to be informed, as with female rape, male rape is not only about sex, but also about domination. As a study points out, ironically, although males are the offenders in both cases, the fathers of female survivors often fear sexual assault will cause their daughters to turn away from men, whereas fathers of male survivors seem to fear their sons will turn toward men for sexual gratification.
Men Raped by Women While reports of men being raped by women are rare, victims in these cases suffer feelings of helplessness, fear, and anxiety similar to those experienced by women who have been raped by men. Men, however, need more guidance to prepare for how friends and family members may react. Many men will react to a man who tells them he was raped by one or more women by laughing and saying, “Why doesn’t that ever happen to me?”
Men Raped by Women As a result, the victim’s fear and anxiety are discounted, which can lead to feelings of self-doubt, isolation, stigmatization, and depression. The rate of post-assault sexual dysfunction is high for men who have been raped by women. Men raped by women also will need an evidentiary exam. Collection of forensic evidence focuses on the presence of the assailant’s DNA in vaginal secretions, saliva, or hair on the victim’s body or clothing, as well as inspection for and documentation of injuries.
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Our Corporate flu vaccination programs are customized to your organisational needs.
Flu or Influenza should not be taken for granted, since the manifestations are often times systemic. The usual signs and symptoms include fever, chills, sore throat, malaise, and cough.
Influenza is usually caused by the pathogens Influenza Virus type A or type B. It is acute and self-limiting in nature but can bring about complications that prove to be potentially disabling. Influenza usually occurs during winter, but because the virus easily mutates, anyone can catch the flu at any time of the year.
With this premise, one can only imagine the advantage that the discovery of flu vaccination has for healthcare. The flu vaccination renders the person protected against the common strains of the Influenza Virus for a maximum of twelve months or one year. This is the reason that a person needs to be vaccinated once every year, usually during the autumn season, in preparation for winter, when flu transmissions are common. The effectiveness of flu vaccines ranges between 70%-90%, so there is a fairly good chance of being spared from getting infected.
According to statistics, one out of four people in an organization, may be infected with influenza during its peak season. This high incidence can be instrumental in the deterioration of individual productivity. The organizations may be financially strained due to factors like absenteeism, interruption of services, and delivery and health benefits costs.
Our Corporate flu vaccination programs can render employees healthy, proactive and productive throughout the entire work year. Think about the increase in return of investment (ROI), when there will be minimal hindrances to business productivity, with fewer absences and less consumption of health costs. We will be providing qualified nursing professionals who come personally to the work place to administer flu shots to the employees. We will be providing a quick wait in line, with accessible online tools and promotional support that will aid in further enhancing the delivery of flu vaccination.
Isn’t it just remarkable how a simple shot of flu vaccine can drastically help a business flourish?
Corporate Care is committed to providing you with the best possible customer service experience.
Please complete the form below. One of our senior consultants will get back to you as quickly as possible. Our goal is to reply to every email within one business day.
Please be assured, we will never sell or distribute the personal information you provide to us. To view our full privacy statement, click here.
Think big, think Corporate Care.
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Mattias Österlund , pp. 45. Inst. för arbetsvetenskap/Dept. Human Work Science, 2000.
Virtual communities are a phenomenon that is becoming more
common as the information technology comes with in reach for
the general public. This report will bring the theories and
construction of a virtual community together.
The purpose of this report is to describe the different theories that have emerged from the research within this field and to examine the work procedures that have been used during the development of a site for a MDA-community. The MDA-website is a homepage on the Internet that was developed to bring the students closer together. The report describes the work of the project group, why the website was not completed and at the end the theories are looked at on the basis of the construction of the website.
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Immersive scene capture and interactive viewing
European Framework 7 collaborative project to develop technology for panoramic imaging and 3D audio acquisition, delivery and interactive viewing
What we've done
FascinatE is a €9.5m EU funded project involving a group of partners from across Europe, running from January 2010 to July 2013. The project name is an acronym for Format-Agnostic SCript-based INterAcTive Experience. The aim is make the broadcasting of live events a more interactive experience no matter what device the viewer is watching on.
The project is developing a system to allow end-users to interactively view and navigate around an ultra-high resolution video panorama showing a live event, with the accompanying audio automatically changing to match the selected view. The output will be adapted to their particular kind of device, covering anything from a mobile handset to an immersive panoramic display. At the production side, this requires the development of new audio and video capture systems, and scripting systems to control the shot framing options presented to the viewer. Intelligent networks with processing components will repurpose the content to suit different device types and framing selections, and user terminals supporting innovative interaction methods will be needed to allow viewers to control and display the content.
Further details can be found on the FascinatE project website
White Paper WHP 207: Combining Panoramic Image and 3D Audio Capture with Conventional Coverage for Immersive and Interactive Content Production
Combining Panoramic Image and 3D Audio Capture with Conventional Coverage for Immersive and Interactive Content Production
More project info
One of our roles in the project is to investigate how conventional broadcast cameras can be used together with an ultra-high-resolution panoramic camera to provide the best experience for viewers. A panoramic camera can provide an image that allows viewers to explore the scene from the “best seat in the stadium”, but the close-up views from broadcast cameras are still needed to give the best viewing experience. This is analogous to the way in which big in-stadium screens are used for sports and concerts. Or work includes looking at image-based registration of broadcast cameras with the panoramic image, so that a broadcast camera feed can be offered automatically when a corresponding region of the scene is selected.
We have also been organising test shoots to allow the technology to be tested in real-world productions that were being covered by the BBC. These included a football match and a Proms concert.
We are also looking at how to integrate the system with other projects at BBC R&D, in particular in relationship to the use of IP throughout the programme chain.
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Yes why not? If Caesar was alive today he would easily have got himself elected to what is still the most powerful position in the world. Life today is actually very much like during the Roman Empire. Crassus personifies big business and banks and Cicero, Julius Caesar and Catilina today’s politicians. And as far as dictators go, Sulla did what that category are doing today already 2,000 years ago.
The headline “Financial reform compromise rebuffed in Senate” could easily be applied to the Roman Empire. Not least since that’s where the original Senate was located. The difference is that today you read news in the media and in those days Roman citizens talked about news on the Forum.
Roman elections, taxation & justice
Just as in some countries today the elite ruled at the expense of the common man.The main tools for power were already then elections, taxation and courts of law. Making profit was crucial to Roman businessmen. Crassus almost had hundreds of slaves executed just to serve his business interests. He had houses burnt down to buy them for nothing to increase his wealth.
Oportunisism still works
Power corrupts and Cicero, just like any opportunistic politician throughout time, completely changed his policies to get elected (does it sound familiar?). And no doubt a fabulous orator like him would also have been able to convince any electorate today to vote for him.
Envy and opinion can alter history
Shakespeare’s play has wrongly made many people believe Caesar was a tyrant, which is far from the truth. He usually refrained from executing his enemies which was his downfall. Would history have looked different if he hadn’t spared Brutus’ life? And the irony is that Brutus may very well have been his illegitimate son. Can’t help thinking of some royal families where assasination today still seems to be the way to the throne. The Julian dynasty emperors after Caesar however became increasingly more tyrannical, which is not unusual in similar families today.
Human nature doesn’t change
So haven’t we learned from what went wrong with the Roman Empire? Why doesn’t humanity evolve, learn from history and move on? Because it is not big business, the banks or politicians that are at fault. It is human nature. Once a generation has learnt from its mistakes another generation takes over that have yet to learn.
Human nature doesn’t change. Many people, even though they would rather die than admit it, would do anything for money, power and glory. Not to mention fame and just simply feeling important.
Vested interests rule the world
Many of us would like to see a fair world. But the world has never been fair and it’s unlikely that it ever will be. About 15 years ago I told a friend of mine who used to be minister of foreign affairs in Mexico that I would like to see all people in the world eat three meals a day and have basic schooling. He told me, “Catarina, it will never happen because vested interests will not allow it”. In other words powerful countries and people will look after its own interests.
But since empires come and go who does what to whom evens out throughout history. In the future the Chinese and Indians will do to the West what the West has been doing to them.
Makes you wonder what makes today different from the past, doesn’t it? Why should people who genuinely want to make a difference succeed today where caring people in the past failed? Will the fact that the whole world is so interconnected make a difference?
Maybe the most important lesson from history is survival? Marcus Mummius, a Roman army commander put it very well over two thousand years ago: “ When you are hurt (in battle) the worst you can do is stop fighting. If you do the pain takes over and you are finished. I have seen many soldiers die of wounds that shouldn’t have been fatal just because they stopped fighting and gave in to the pain. No you just scream and throw yourself right back into the fight. That way you will neither feel the pain nor bleed to death since the blood will rush to your brain and the arm that holds your sword to enable you to succeed”.
(photo: genjo m Flickr)Google+
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A new electrical substation and underground cable connecting to an offshore windfarm are to be installed at one of four sites in Bicker Fen.
The plans, by RWE npower renewables, will see enough energy created by the proposed Triton Knoll Offshore Wind Farm to power up to 850,000 homes.
The company is today (Wednesday) announcing a consultation on the wind farm’s electrical system.
Project manager for Tritton Knoll Jacob Hain explained: “In order to transmit the electricity generated, infrastructure will be required between the offshore wind farm and the national grid connection point. This will consist of undersea cables travelling from the offshore wind farm to a location in the vicinity of Anderby Creek. We will then bury cables underground to an intermediate electrical compound on one of three short listed sites in the East Lindsey area.
“Underground cables will then travel to a substation on one of four short-listed sites near the national grid connection point at Bicker Fen.”
The cables will be laid in 1km-wide ‘cable corridors’ to be narrowed down to a 60m-wide ‘cable route’.
Mr Hain said the proposed sites are all located ‘hundreds of metres away’ from existing properties, so would have minimal impact on homes in the Bicker area.
As part of the proposals, Bicker Fen will receive a ‘community investment package’ - with funding to develop the area. A figure for how much investment will be provided is yet to be announced.
The consultation process runs from February 19 to April 5 with a series of public exhibitions held between March 5-11.
The Triton Knoll project team will be available at the events to answer questions and talk about the options identified and why they are being considered. Images of what the infrastructure could look like will be available to view at the events.
A project update is also being sent out widely to residents and organisations in the areas involved. All information will be available at public access points or on the RWE npower renewables website www.npower-renewables.com/tritonknoll.
Mr Hain added: “The consultation will ensure that the location we finally choose is the most appropriate location for the Triton Knoll electrical infrastructure.
”Once the consultation period is underway, we will contact those in the near vicinity of the short listed sites so they can be clear about what is being proposed and have the chance to comment on our suggestions. We hope for as many people as possible to get involved with our consultation as we are very keen to get the views of local people.”
The consultation events in the Boston area are as follows:
Tuesday, March 5, at Swineshead Village Hall, Swineshead, 3-7pm.
Wednesday, March 6, at Bicker Fen Village Hall, Cemetery Road, Bicker, 3-7pm.
Saturday, March 9, Stickney Community Hall, Hall Lane, Stickney, 3-7pm.
What do you think to the plans? Comment below or email your views to firstname.lastname@example.org
- Conservatives lose control of Lincolnshire County Council
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Weather for Boston, Lincolnshire
Saturday 25 May 2013
Temperature: 6 C to 14 C
Wind Speed: 18 mph
Wind direction: North east
Temperature: 6 C to 18 C
Wind Speed: 12 mph
Wind direction: North west
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When heading out on the road with your pet bird, follow basic travel tips and pack pet bird food for on the go.
Packing protein and fat, a few nuts can go a long way. Less food in carriers means less mess – for your car and your pet bird’s travel environment. Both create a more pleasant trip.
A spray of millet makes a handy portable pet bird food. Because it’s irresistible to many birds, seeing a spray of millet in a travel cage creates enticement to enter the unusual environment.
Carrots are rich in beta-carotene, from which the body makes Vitamin A, and Vitamins B and C, potassium, thiamine, folic acid and magnesium. Keeping your bird healthy on the road helps prevent contraction of new viruses it might encounter.
Fresh fruit, such as apple slices, hold lots of liquid and make a great hydrating snack for pet birds. For trips under two hours, packing a water source isn’t necessary. During those trips you can supplement your water supply with these water-bearing treats.
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Please help stop Spanish horse wrestling festival next year
BACKGROUND | SOURCE FACEBOOK
Rapa das bestas is an ancient, cruel, barbaric, and primitive Spanish festival in Galicia Spain, which is also termed as ‘Taming the Beasts’, in which men and women from all the ages wrestle untamed horses to the ground with their bare hands without any weapons and cut their manes and tails causing huge suffering and injuries to the horses. The event take place every year on the first Saturday of July.
Rapa das bestas is a three-day festival starting from first Saturday of July and most of the men and women of the village participate in the wrestling of 600-700 horses of different breeds including stallions, mares, and foals. The meaning of “Rapa das bestas” is “the reaping of the horses” and it is a tradition where people show their courage against these “beasts”. This festival is also celebrated to declare the village’s independence and virility.
Please go to this page for the images of this festival:
Go to this link for more info:
firstname.lastname@example.org , email@example.com , firstname.lastname@example.org , email@example.com , firstname.lastname@example.org
To Whom It Concerns,
I would like to draw your attention to the Rapa Das Bestas, the Spanish Horse Wrestling festival, held in Galicia every July. This is an event where some 600-700 horses, including stallions, mares, and foals, are brutally wrestled down. The festival allegedly dates back to the Bronze Age, and was a demonstration of the village’s independence, strength, and virility. Today, this is simply a primitive and barbaric festival that only demonstrates a lack of respect for animals and animal welfare.
Even though animals are not slaughtered during the festival, many horses do get injured, whether it is as a consequence of the horse wrestling, or a result of being confined in large masses in small spaces during the event. Cutting of the horses’ manes and tails is unnecessary, as it removes the horses’ natural defenses from flying insects.
You claim that it does not involve cruelty simply because it does not involve killing. Horses are traumatized in the process, however. It might not be your intention to harm or kill the horse, but all the animal experiences is being chased down, brutally manhandled, and forced to the ground. The vets and officials present cannot prevent the unnecessary distress and fear these animals experience.
I urge you to stop this barbaric festival for all future purposes. You consider this a noble tradition – however, there is nothing noble in taking advantage of sentient beings and putting them through such horrors. That it is a tradition doesn’t mean that it still needs occur. Until this barbarism ceases, I will boycott Spain and share this information with friends, family, and online social contacts.
Thank you for taking the time to read this urgent message.
how would you feel if you were the horse.
being manhandled and abused,
you would not like it, of course.
there is no excuse.
cancel this stupidity,
do not be so
Karen Lyons Kalmenson
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NCDOT crews prep roads for weather
by Staff Reports
With winter weather predicted to hit parts of the state on Friday, N.C. Department of Transportation crews in many regions are pretreating roads and taking other steps to prepare for the storm.
NCDOT maintenance crews are using a salt-water mixture called brine, which is a cost-effective way to help prevent snow and ice from bonding to the pavement.
Statewide, more than 1,900 trucks are equipped with snow plows and graders in addition to 325 front-end loaders and backhoes and 450 motor graders. NCDOT has 146,500 tons of salt on hand. A typical statewide frozen precipitation event requires 40,000 tons of salt.
In the North Carolina mountains and foothills, crews are treating major roadways with brine. Once that is completed, equipment will be refitted with plows and spreaders and be on standby until needed.
As crews continue to pretreat roads, remember to leave plenty of distance between your vehicle and the trucks spraying brine.
If you have to drive on icy roads, remember the following:
Bridges and overpasses freeze first.
Put away the cellphone.
Use only gentle pressure on both the accelerator and the brakes to avoid skidding.
Give other motorists plenty of room in case you or the other drivers begin to slide.
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Wildfires out West and floods in Florida. Just more weird weather, or — dum, dum, dum — the end of the world as we know it? In this summer’s most buzzed-about book, The Age of Miracles, first-time novelist Karen Thompson Walker posits an end-days scenario triggered by the slowing of the Earth’s rotation.
“We didn’t notice right away. We couldn’t feel it,” begins narrator Julia, a Southern California sixth-grader. She recalls that they were distracted by weather and war, worrying about the wrong things: “the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the ice caps, West Nile and swine flu and killer bees. But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different — unimagined, unprepared for, unknown.”
As far as global castastrophes goes, “the slowing” is a pretty good one. Birds plummet from the sky as gravity shifts. Whales beach themselves. Long days stretch into white nights. Some plants begin to die, some people sicken, including Julia’s mother, who like many others, begins hoarding canned goods and candles. A period of panic sets in before the government decides society should continue 24/7, even if it means school begins in the middle of the night. The “real-timers” rebel, preferring to stick to circadian rhythms, although they are ostracized by their neighbors. A good many pick up and light out for the territory to establish their own communities.
Apocalypse nigh, of course, is a speculative fiction staple, and dystopia the favorite setting of current YA novels. But The Age of Miracles lacks the vitality of many of those books, such as Veronica Roth’s Divergent. Walker’s tone is elegiac, her writing elegant as Julia details both the ordinary travails of early adolescence — best friends, first loves, sleepovers, soccer games — and such extraordinary events as raging solar storms and rips in the magnetic field. It’s this counterpoint that makes for an intimate, involving narrative.
“We kids were not as afraid as we should have been,” Julia confesses. “We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence.”
How much you enjoy The Age of Miracles will depend on how much you care about Julia’s small world of family and friends — her weary mother, her secretive father, her feisty grandfather, her classmate Seth — and all the little dramas of life going on.
Open Book: I read a digital galley via NetGalley of Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles (Random House). Soon it will disappear from my Nook, but not from my memory.
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WHY AND HOW WOULD CIRCUMCISION BE BENEFICIAL TO MY SON?
ANSWER: Circumcision is a practice that has existed for over 3,700 years. History indicates that circumcision has been in practice because of the various health benefits involved. The principal advantages are: 1) Preventative health care – circumcision aids in the prevention of certain diseases, among them penile cancer. 2) Sociological benefits – boys feel more comfortable among their friends when they are circumcised like them. 3) Religious fulfillment – by having had a circumcision, the boy has fulfilled the Biblical commandment that all males be circumcised.
OUR SON IS NOW A TEENAGER AND HAS NOT YET BEEN CIRCUMCISED. CAN HE STILL HAVE IT DONE OR IS THERE AN AGE LIMIT TO HAVING THE CIRCUMCISION PERFORMED?
ANSWER: Circumcision is a procedure that can be performed at any age. There are various reasons for which teenage boys are circumcised. Among them are: 1) There are those parents who, when their son was young, decided against circumcision. Now when their son is a teenager, they rethink their opinion and decide that it is, in fact, in their son’s best interest that circumcision be performed. 2) In many instances, the boy himself decides that he wishes to be circumcised so as not to be different than the other boys in his social circle. All in all, teenaged circumcision is not an uncommon phenomenon.
WE HAVE DECIDED TO HAVE OUR TEENAGE SON CIRCUMCISED. HOWEVER, HE IS OPPOSED TO THIS. WHAT SHOULD BE OUR APPROACH TO THIS ?
ANSWER: The most common reason for which a child may experience shyness or apprehensiveness are: 1) nobody wants to have an operation done. 2) When parents and doctors make an issue of as sensitive topic as circumcision, the child becomes withdrawn. He, understandably, does not wish that attention be drawn to this. It is, therefore, important that the child be made to understand that circumcision is a private issue in which no one other that the Mohel, Sandek and his parents are involved. Nobody else other than these few unavoidable, immediately-involved people have to be aware of it. In most of the cases with which we’ve dealt, one of the child’s first reactions following the circumcision is "why did I not have this done before?"
WILL OUR BOY EXPERIENCE PAIN DURING AND FOLLOWING THE CIRCUMCISION PROCEDURE?
ANSWER: The child is given local or general anesthesia and will, therefore, experience no pain throughout the procedure. Should he experience any post-circumcision discomfort, he will be administered the appropriate medications.
HOW LONG FOLLOWING THE PROCEDURE DOES IT TAKE TO RECOVER?
ANSWER: Although the healing process varies by each individual, the average person is completely healed within 2 or 3 weeks. In fact, in most cases, once the procedure is done, no further care is necessary to aid in the healing process.
WHAT ARE THE EXPENSES INVOLVED IN HAVING MY SON CIRCUMCISED?
ANSWER: For a newborn to be circumcised, the related expenses included the travel costs and a few other relatively-minor things. For an older boy, however, the expenses are slightly higher because of the anesthesia and the medical preparations. They also include the necessary follow-up visits. The average total costs range between $500 and $1500 – a fraction of the cost of having it done as an average surgical procedure.
WILL INSURANCE COVER THE COST OF HAVING MY SON CIRCUMCISED?
ANSWER: If a doctor determines that the boy’s circumcision is medically necessary, the insurance will cover it. If, however, doctor determines it not to be medical necessary, meaning that the boys foreskin retracts completely and without restriction, resulting in no discomfort during erection, he will then conclude that the circumcision request is for cosmetic purposes only and insurance will, therefore, not cover it.
We suggest that you contact us in such a situation. We at ACT maintain a list of doctors who are advocates for the benefits of circumcision who will work with the insurance companies to accommodate your request. It is understood that the insurance companies look to avoid paying money where they can.
MY DOCTOR AND INSURANCE COMPANY HAVE DETERMINED THAT MY SON’S CIRCUMCISION IS UNNECESSARY. WHY, THEN, SHOULD I NEVERTHELESS HAVE MY SON CIRCUMCISED?
ANSWER: There are a number of reasons as to why you should have your son(s) circumcised. One example would be the medical preventiveness involved. The circumcision procedure takes approximately 20 minutes while its benefits lasts a lifetime!
There is also a scientific hypothesis which state that the foreskin’s inner lining is an entry-point for viruses and bacteria. Its removal, consequently, lessens the ability for these organisms to enter the body. There have been a number of books published which delve extensively on how this hypothesis was proven. Another area that should be considered is the fact that most boys today are circumcised because of the aforementioned issue. Several boys have expressed concern of the fact that most boys in their gym class are circumcised while they are not. This complex could possibly have a major effect the boy’s self-esteem and identity.
A Bris is a pinnacle celebration in Jewish life and a milestone event for your family. The feeling and emotion is captured in our photos of circumcision ceremonies performed by Israel Heller.
It's simpler than you think. Follow these detailed pointers and enjoy peace of mind knowing you haven't missed an important guideline for the sensitive care necessary as your baby heals.
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There’s a stereotype about the Trenton school system that at least one student from the district is tired of hearing.
“We have a lot to offer,” proclaims KaShauna Whetstone about students at Trenton’s Medical Arts Learning Community, a curricular division of Trenton Central High School (TCHS). “So to whoever said nothing good’s coming out of Trenton—we’re the good part that’s coming out.”
Whetstone is one of 20 TCHS juniors participating in Bridge to Employment (BTE), a selective, three-year tutoring and career-orienting program funded by Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and co-run by TCNJ’s Bonner Center for Civic and Community Engagement. BTE was launched at TCHS in 2008 to guide district students to higher education and future careers via weekly tutoring, professional mentoring, exam preparation, and internships.
So far, the multifaceted program is a hit amongst its participants, and all signs suggest that this has a lot to do with the once-a-week tutoring sessions run by students from TCNJ’s Bonner Center.
Every Tuesday afternoon, a team of Bonner Community Scholars and student volunteers led by coordinator Morgan Reil ’08 meet with their high school counterparts for several hours of relaxed tutoring and exam prep. Open Options major Ryan Pilarski ’13 describes these gatherings as a sort of “homework club”—a social safe-haven where students receive the help they need when they hit a snag in their studies.
Upon arriving at TCHS one day this past semester, the tutors from TCNJ were greeted with hugs and smiles before the two student groups set about that afternoon’s activities, mixing informalities with intensive course review and homework assistance.
Dan Lee ’12, a Math/Science/Technology and elementary education double major, is known as the go-to tutor for students with math questions. That day he was reviewing geometric theorems with several BTE students.
“When it comes to formulas and stuff my mind is … somewhere else,” TCHS student Sydney Williams says, “but Dan helps me out with that.” Both Williams and classmate Nikki Hewitt attest that they’ve seen an improvement in their grades as a result of their after-school studies.
Though BTE is geared toward so-called STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine) learning, Bonner tutors offer their specialties wherever needed. For instance, Pilarski spent the afternoon discussing Cold War history with a BTE student—elucidating key terms like witch hunt and fallout shelter—while another Bonner volunteer read Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five with several other high-schoolers.
Between the tutoring, exam preparation, and SAT help, BTE covers all the bases. Yet the resources that BTE affords its participants run deeper than the conventional academic help. At the heart of BTE are the personal ties that develop between the students and their TCNJ mentors, who are at most only a few years older.
“So many high school students…don’t see what college students actually go through,” explains TCHS English teacher and faculty supervisor Rebecca Schwartz. “It’s that lofty, ‘Yeah, I want to go to college!’ But they’ve never actually talked to people who are in college, and they’ve never really seen that side of it.”
The age gap between TCNJ tutors and BTE students is optimal: the tutors are young enough to remember high school but old enough to be able to shed light on that ambiguous gap between secondary and higher education. Both TCNJ and TCHS acknowledge the benefits.
“Sometimes you have the idea that when you go to college you’re going to change, [and] it’s not going to be fun,” Whetstone says. “But [TCNJ students] coming here show you that you still have fun, you still have personality.”
Psychology major Kaitlyn Nichols-O’Neil ’13 says that while some Bonner Scholars volunteer to tutor, she was assigned to BTE. “It has really opened my eyes,” she explains. “[Tutoring is] a different experience when you’re working with kids who are around your age.”
“You’re almost revisiting and seeing the same frustrations that you faced in high school,” Natasha Balani ’11, biology and psychology double major, adds.
Finance major Tariq Shabazz ’10, who grew up in Trenton and attended public schools in the district through eighth grade, aspires to set an example for the TCHS students. “I wanted to come back and help. I wanted to share my experiences with these students,” he explains. “I’m sort of like that portrait…they can look at and say, ‘I want to do those same things and I want to give back.’”
Shabazz, Balani, and economics major Tamara Ibezim ’11 have been tutoring at TCHS since before the current program was initiated. Each says they have made meaningful connections in the process.
Shabazz spoke of his friendship with BTE participant Dan McMorris: “He feels he can talk to me about anything, so he texts me, or he may call me just to see how I’m doing.”
“I think it’s definitely a different experience when you’re tutoring someone versus … [performing] other sorts of service,” Ibezim explains. “You see that progression…. You might not see instant results, but I think the end benefit is what makes the work that you do so gratifying.”
The group dynamic that defines the tutoring sessions extends beyond these weekly routines. BTE allows students to partake in a number of extraordinary activities outside the classroom. Earlier this year a group of BTE students attended Liberty Science Center’s “Cardiac Classroom,” where they observed a live heart surgery and conversed with the surgeons throughout the procedure. There is an annual trip to the Princeton-Blairstown Center, where the students take part in team-building activities. This summer, many of the BTE students will again enroll in the weeklong Summer Institute, during which they reside in TCNJ dorms, meet TCNJ students and professors, perform community service, and participate in health care–related workshops, science experiments, and social activities. Monique Nazario says last summer’s program was “the bomb.”
“We cultured worms … something I would never do,” she explains.
Between the summer program and other visits to the campus, BTE students have gotten pretty familiar with the College.
“We know TCNJ like the back of our hands,” Williams says.
When asked where they plan on going after high school, many say they hope to attend TCNJ.
“It’s great to know that [the] students are interested in a great college that is close to home, accessible, and affordable,” says Schwartz.
Beyond the hands-on learning these TCHS students get at the College, a number of them have received hands-on work experience through BTE’s professional internships with Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a J&J subsidiary. They completed paid internships in subfields such as sales and marketing, research, and customer relations thanks to their participation in BTE.
J&J plays a productive role in the classroom as well. Its 15 corporate mentors visit the BTE students once a month and lead small-group activities, including college searches and discussions about character and individuality.
One of them, Felicia D’Oria ’93, has been mentoring at TCHS since November 2009, and said she welcomes the chance to help the students. “I’ve learned through working for Johnson & Johnson that it is very important to give back to the communities in which we live,” she says, “and I think this is a great way to go out and show young people that there are so many opportunities out in the world for them.”
The opportunity to be a part of something special is what first attracted TCHS student Denzel Poole to BTE. A latecomer to the program, Poole says that during his sophomore year, a friend told him about the opportunities BTE opens up for participants. “I wasn’t ‘in’ anything, but I wanted to be a part of something,” Poole remembers. This past October, the TCHS junior approached Schwartz and inquired about joining the program. He has attended every weekly tutoring session since.
Poole, a self-described “quiet type,” says he plans to become a pediatrician after college. While he realizes the academic resources that BTE affords him will serve him well as he charts his path toward college, medical school, and a career, it’s the inclusive, group-focused dynamic of BTE that keeps him coming back.
“I feel like I can fit in here,” he explains.
That dynamic is not only BTE’s most visible virtue, it’s one of the best reasons this class of future scholars has to gather every week with their TCNJ counterparts to buckle down and study. In the process they’re not only building bridges to successful careers, they’re also shattering a few stereotypes along the way.
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This week I’ll be traveling in Canada, talking with experts, business owners, and workers about the surprisingly strong recovery that Canada has experienced following the Great Recession.
Over the last five years, Ontario and Quebec have actually grown jobs. People I’ve spoken to so far credit better government. Canada’s strong bank regulatory scheme prevented big failures.
In fact, not a single bank failed in Canada, during a time when hundreds of American banks were toppling.
And there is no mortgage crisis here. While US homeowners face down a tsunami, fewer than 1% of Canadian mortgages are in arrears.
But there’s also a sense that Canada’s strong economic performance transcends this moment of turmoil.
When you compare the struggling towns across northern New York with their counterparts the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River, it’s hard not to see a growing gap in vitality and private investment.
And when you match booming Kingston, Ottawa and Toronto with comparable American cities in the region — Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago — you see growth on the Canadian side and contraction in the US.
So here’s the question:
If southern Ontario is building a stronger, more diversified economy than the North Country, what are they doing that we can emulate?
What’s happening here in Kingston — where I’m writing this blog post — that allows the population to grow and new businesses to open?
And can those ideas be copied in Watertown, less than two hours away?
Both communities sit in beautiful areas. Both have prisons and big military bases providing a foundation for the local economy. But Kingston is clearly pulling away, offering its citizens more opportunities, more prosperity.
Tune in this week as we talk about the very different political and economic climate in Canada — what is it that’s making a difference? And as always, share your ideas below.
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The President of Tunisia Moncef Marzouki has proposed to the Syrian President to go to Russia with his family into exile. In a speech at the first meeting of the Friends of Syria, which was held in Tunis, he said the Assad family should be guaranteed immunity.
"Justice will not be served, but the life of the Syrians is more important than justice," he said, stressing that such a solution, along the lines of the Yemen road plan, is better than a military intervention or the arming of deserters.
"Friends of Syria" hosted more than 70 countries, and called for a ceasefire so that humanitarian aid can reach the worst affected areas.
While international pressure on the Syrian regime seems to be increasing, the bombardment of Homs by government troops continues. According to activists, on Friday at least eight people were killed in the protests in the besieged city. Nationally, according to activists, on Friday at least 50 people were killed, including 12 children
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December 29, 1983
In your letter of October 12, 1983 you requested information relative to the Massachusetts tax liability of a corporation doing business in Massachusetts and its nonresident shareholders. The corporation has elected to be treated as an S corporation for federal tax purposes.
Massachusetts has not adopted the federal treatment of S corporations and their shareholders.
Massachusetts law contains no provision permitting corporations to elect not to be subject to Massachusetts corporation excise. A foreign corporation doing business in Massachusetts is required to file a corporation excise return and pay the tax imposed by Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 63.
For federal income tax purposes items of income, loss, deduction or credit of an S corporation are included in the shareholders' gross income. Federal S corporation status is disregarded for purposes of determining the Massachusetts gross income of S corporation shareholders. Therefore, items of income, loss, deduction or credit of the S corporation included in shareholders' federal gross income are excluded for purposes of determining Massachusetts gross income. Actual distributions from earnings by an S corporation are included in Massachusetts gross income of the shareholders. (G.L. c. 62, §§ 2(a)(1)(E) and 2(a)(2)(B)).
General Laws Chapter 62, Section 5A, provides that the Massachusetts gross income of a nonresident is determined solely with respect to items of gross income from sources within Massachusetts. Such items are those which are derived from or effectively connected with any trade or business, including any employment carried on by the taxpayer in Massachusetts; the participation in any lottery or wagering transaction within Massachusetts; or the ownership of any interest in real or tangible personal property located in Massachusetts.
Distributions received by a nonresident individual from a foreign corporation doing business in Massachusetts, whether or not it has elected S corporation status for federal tax purposes, are not subject to Massachusetts taxation.
A nonresident individual with no income subject to Massachusetts taxation is not required to file a Massachusetts personal income tax return.
Very truly yours
/s/Ira A. Jackson
Ira A. Jackson
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toccata (təkäˈtə, tō–) [key] [Ital., = touched], type of musical composition. Early examples were written for various instruments, but the best-known form of toccata originated about the beginning of the 17th cent. Free in form, it was one of the first attempts at idiomatic writing for keyboard instruments, in contrast to the strictly contrapuntal pieces of the Renaissance. The toccata was usually rhapsodic, often interspersing rapid passages of brilliant figuration with fugal sections. Andrea Gabrieli, Frescobaldi, Sweelinck, Froberger, Buxtehude, and Bach were outstanding masters of the toccata style. Schumann wrote a toccata for piano in sonata form. As a brilliant showpiece the toccata persists today in organ composition.
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
More on toccata from Fact Monster:
See more Encyclopedia articles on: Music: Theory, Forms, and Instruments
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Arrrrrr….pirates and principles
Global Justice and Moral Obligations
In mid-April, pirates off the coast of Somalia took the captain of an American container ship hostage sparking a 4-day standoff with the U.S. Navy. Out of gas, food and water, the pirates found themselves face-to-face with a 500-foot guided missile destroyer. Affiliated pirates, seeking ways to improve their partners’ bargaining power, threatened to kill other (non-American) hostages being held further out at sea if the standoff ended in the death or capture of the pirates. The U.S. was undeterred. On April 12, Navy SEALS, with authorization from President Obama to act if the captain’s life was perceived to be in danger, shot all three pirates and rescued Captain Richard Phillips.
What was otherwise a relatively simple decision for the President was made morally complex by the pirates’ threat to kill the other hostages. No longer was the choice simply about how much risk to take in rescuing the one hostage (ie. whether to act immediately or wait until the conditions were just right). There were now two distinct normative questions at play: the degree to which we may give greater weight to the interests of Americans over those of non-Americans; and whether the President (in his role as president) must promote the interests of Americans above those of others. Though these may look similar, they arise from distinct philosophical issues.
The first question is at the core of debates over global justice: may we (and to what degree) prioritize the interests of compatriots? One view, the Nationalist Idea or the Priority Thesis, argues that we can – “compatriots take priority,” claims Oxford philosopher Henry Shue. The justification of this view, also defended by John Rawls and NYU philosopher Thomas Nagel, may lie foundationally, in the value of special relationships; in consequentialist arguments that giving priority to compatriots is most likely to maximize justice; or in the contractarian view that the principles of justice extend only to those engaged in social-political cooperation (i.e. statehood).
The opposing cosmopolitan idea claims just the opposite: that on issues of justice we must give equal weight to each individual’s interests regardless of nationality. At the core of the cosmopolitan argument, defended most prominently by Princeton’s Charles Beitz and Yale’s Thomas Pogge, is the belief that the national ideal discriminates by prescribing unequal treatment on the basis of nationality, a trait that is (most often) not chosen. Cosmopolitans might counter the Nationalists’ justifications by challenging their various empirical assumptions: that the foundational argument is flawed because modern countries are so large that it is a stretch to characterize the relationships between citizens as “special;” that the consequentialist view requires a background of equally distributed resource and talents; or that the global economy is so interdependent that the idea of isolated self-sufficient nations each engaged in a distinct social contract, as required by the contractarian view, is laughably simple.
The second question, on the other hand, begins in the literature on moral obligations and is somewhat less controversial. At issue is whether the act of voluntarily accepting a position creates an obligation to perform the positional duties that come with that office. In other words, is President Obama morally (not just legally) obligated to fulfill the duties and responsibilities of the presidency (regardless of their content) because he voluntarily accepted the position. Connected to this normative question is a legal one: does the Presidential oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” and any other positional duties of the presidency require President Obama to give greater weight to the interests of Americans in making foreign policy decisions. In order to conclude that the President must promote the interests of Americans ahead of others, one must answer in the affirmative to both the normative question – that there exists a moral obligation to execute the duties of the office – and the legal question – that these duties include a requirement to prioritize the interests of Americans.
Of course, drawing a conclusion on either one of the larger normative questions only creates a prima facie case for a specific course of action. For it is entirely possible for one to be a cosmopolitan and also believe that the President has a special obligation to American citizens.
One reason that philosophers have largely abandoned the public arena is its messiness – it is rare to find public policy debates that do not require difficult choices between deeply held, yet conflicting moral principles. Recognizing these core principles is step one. We will address how one makes choices between them later.
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But airports may be what harbors once were. I have a recent paper that looks at differences in population and employment growth across metropolitan areas: education matters, climate matters, and airports matter, a lot.
Here is the paper's conclusion:
This paper sought to find a relationship between airport activity and economic development, and it found one. Passenger boardings per capita and passenger originations per capita in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas are powerful predictors of population growth and employment growth. This is the case after a number of controls are put in place, and survives after an attempt to control for simultaneity issues. Beyond statistical significance, the magnitude of the coefficient on boardings per capita indicates that the magnitude of the effect of passenger boardings on these two measures of economic development could be rather large. It might particularly suggest that where airports are constrained by capacity (such as they are in Chicago, Boston, New York and Los Angeles), adding to capacity might well have an important economic development impact. That said, these results do not suggest that every small city should run out and build a large airport.
Of course the results presented here are far from conclusive: they are, perhaps, among the first of their kind (this paper was written contemporaneously with Brueckner 2003), and are therefore subject to far more scrutiny. Nevertheless, their statistical significance is sufficiently strong that it survives a large variety of alternative specifications. The results are also consistent with the findings in Brueckner.
The policy implications of this finding are therefore quite important. The political economy of airports is very much a function of their governance structure. The cost (at least the perceived cost) of airports to members of a community is highly concentrated geographically, while the benefits tend to be diffused throughout the community. Airports are sometimes under the control of local units of government, such as city councils or county boards. When this is the case, representatives whose districts include an airport have a strong incentive to become members of the airport authority. Consequently, decisions about airports can be based on parochial interests, even if the total benefits of the airport to the economy exceed the cost. Should air traffic be a large determinant of economic success, it is entirely possible that the benefits of new or expanded airports exceed costs.
Yet we have observed that in many places (San Francisco, Boston, Milwaukee), interest groups have worked to inhibit runway expansion, while in other places (Chicago), local political squabbles have prevented any number of potentially reasonable plans for expanding airport capacity from going forward in a timely manner. All this suggests that airport policy might best be made regionally, rather than locally. Of course, the regional policy would have to include a scheme for compensating those injured by airport expansion. But if the regional benefits of airport development are large, the costs of fair compensation should be easy to finance.
The paper is available on the GW Web Site. http://www.gwu.edu/~business/research/workingpapers/Airport%20GW.pdf
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After reading about J.D. Salinger’s death, I went home and took my copy of Catcher In the Rye off the shelf. I bought it, secondhand, in the spring of my sophomore year, on my high school’s biology field trip. I’d previously read the book, of course, but I didn’t have a copy — I’m the daughter of a librarian who thought books ought to be borrowed rather than owned. It still has the address of a Down East public school stamped on the inside flap.
I remember being deeply impressed Salinger’s writing, by the fluidity and forceful voice. But the worry of finding it somehow adolescent made me hesitate to open the book again today. At the time, my own writing was feverish but unformed. It’s been enough, I guess, to earn me a living and, that Salinger spring, a spot at the Breadloaf. Coming home from Vermont, my friend R.S. and I tried to convince our chaperone, Mrs. A., to detour to Cornish. Like all tortured teenage poets, we were Salinger stalkers.
I suppose it’s because Salinger was the quintessential author of teen angst that he still has such sway, even though nothing’s been published in his name, short of court filings, in decades. Don’t we all romanticise our rites of passage? Don’t we want to return to a place in time where, beneath professed cynicism, we could believe in the catcher in the rye?
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The Engineering Young Entrepreneurs Scheme (YES) is a competition jointly organised by Loughborough and Nottingham universities in partnership with the Rotary Club. Engineering YES is aimed at postgraduate research students and early career researchers within five years of obtaining their doctorate. Teams can include up to two post-doc members.
Teams spend three days and nights working on a business plan for an imaginary start-up company before presenting it to a group of investors and industry experts who judge the best bid.
Participants learn the techniques of how to go about planning a new engineering research based business venture and also get the chance to meet meet some interesting people who have done it for real.
This year's Grand Final was held at Birmingham Science Park on Wednesday 8 June 2011 and the top prize and £2000 was claimed by team Pinnacle from the University of Manchester. A team from Nottingham took the prize for best teamwork in the 2011 Midlands Heat and last year a team from Nottingham claimed the top prize.
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DARPA working on T-ray spyeye spectacle tech
Offers Vatican Jesus conspiracy and nudity bonanza
Pentagon boffinry chiefs have sprung aboard the terahertz technology bandwagon which has been gathering speed in recent times.
Funding is now on offer for those who can have a credible stab at making the slippery T-ray easier to generate and detect, potentially unlocking a huge techno treasure vault stuffed with goodies such as unused wireless spectrum, long-hidden art masterpieces and improved airport security. However, like all good technology breakthroughs, T-rays also offer users the ability to look at pictures of naked people and read conspiracy theories.
The latest push for improved T-ray tech comes from DARPA, the poorly-integrated, troubling, erratically brilliant bulge-headed mutant child of the US military establishment. The war-profs have just chucked out a solicitation for ideas, downloadable here. According to DARPA:
The sub-millimeter wave frequency band between 0.3 to 3 Terahertz has historically been extremely difficult to access due to a lack of effective means to generate, detect, process, and radiate radio-frequency (RF) signals. The range of potential applications... is nonetheless extensive, including imaging, radar, spectroscopy, and communications.
The terahertz band lying between optics and present-day electronics is nowadays being accessed more and more, though at present this calls for expensive specialised kit. Art brains from the Louvre have lately used T-ray scanning to view murals hidden beneath plaster overlays. They believe that hundreds of long-lost art masterpieces, hidden beneath friezes or similar which are too valuable to be scraped off, might be so brought to light - including at least one mural by Leonardo da Vinci, which would presumably have at least some chance of revealing an ancient Vatican conspiracy to hush up some quality dirt on Jesus' girlfriend or similar. Alternatively you might suddenly find comparatively dull directions to the Holy Grail. Likewise, acres of high-class Renaissance-era pornorotica, with clothes later painted on in prudish censorship stylee, could now be exposed to the public through the magic of T-rays.
As if that wasn't enough in terms of Vatican Jesus coverup scandal and possible intellectually kosher cryptic grumble-snap benefits, there's yet more nudity on offer. Current T-ray and T-ray related airport security scanners, for instance, are strictly passive - viewing the millimetre or terahertz waves naturally emitted by the human body. Thus, their through-clothes perving capabilities are intrinsically limited - and in any case of little use recreationally, since large scanner machines are a bit conspicuous.
Those of us who remember the X-ray spectacle adverts in the back of old Superman comics have always fancied something a trifle more portable and unobtrusive - more on the lines of the slightly dodgy-looking blue tinted jobs employed by James Bond in the The World Is Not Enough, for instance. These, tastefully, made outer garments invisible but left frilly underthings fairly opaque - but one imagines there would be some kind of adjustable knob for full penetration. As it were.
DARPA's new, smaller active T-ray generators and receivers are plainly a step in the right direction.
There's also the prospect of a lot of new wireless bandwidth, too, though fairly short-range unless it could be used mainly in the upper atmosphere. ®
just got my pair
Now where's that moderatrix?
"A title is required"
"finding the Holy Grail and sheding light on the existence of Jesus' girlfriend"
---> And here I was thinking they were one and the same ;)
"unlocking a huge techno treasure vault stuffed with goodies such as unused wireless spectrum"
<--- Places bid.
"more on the lines of the slightly dodgy-looking blue tinted jobs employed by James Bond in the The World Is Not Enough"
--->Still pushing for red tint, but then again Fuion is no James Bond.
"though fairly short-range unless it could be used mainly in the upper atmosphere"
<--- Waiting for spaceship shuttle/pickup in my front yard...
@Aliens in my tea..
Playing hard to get, Hate2Register? Lovers never ever do that.
There's some Real Hot CodeXXXX being Hosted on El Reg ...... QuITe Pioneering too, and obviously Understated as you appear not to have noticed IT.
Although one may have to consider that is ITs Astute Stealth ProgramMIng
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Over 2000 Birdwatchers have visited the Dungeness RSPB nature reserve over the past week to try to view the crested lark bird which has been seen for only the 3rd time in Britain in the past 35 years.
The crested lark was seen at Dungeness National Nature Reserve in Kent on Wednesday 29th April. A Spokesman for the Romney Marsh Countryside Project, Owen Leyshon, said the rare bird was similar to the more common skylark but “slightly plainer and a different shape”.
Owen added: “It will have crossed over the Channel from France. They are not rare in Europe, but they are here as they are a non-migratory bird and do not usually like flying over water”. He also said that the crested lark was “quite secretive and flighty so it’s hard to get prolonged views of it on the ground. It’s quite an amazing spectacle to see hundreds of birdwatchers running across the shingle chasing it.”
The last sighting of a crested lark in Britain was 12 years ago. The sighting before that was in Dungeness in 1975.
Source: BBC Kent News website – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/8030713.stm
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If you are a teacher click here for a version of the problem suitable for classroom use, together with supporting materials. Otherwise, read on ...
Nine squares with side lengths $1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 15$ and $18$ cm can be fitted together with no gaps and no overlaps, to form a rectangle.
What are the dimensions of the rectangle?
Once you've had a chance to think about it, click below to see how three different pupils began working on the task.
This is how Anna started:
Here is what Brendan tried:
Here is Chandra's initial approach to the problem:
Can you take each of these starting ideas and develop them into a solution?
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This week in the Gamification Roundup, we got a happy union of technology and gamification. BadgeVille has released a mobile SDK for their gamification platform. City Peaks uses RFID sensors to track workers’ stair ascents up buildings and AutoTutor is doing some impressive user analyzation to create customized teaching content for students. Top it all up with some new gamification uses at GDC. Great week for the technological advancements – read the full roundup after the jump.
Badgeville Brings Gamification to Mobile – Gigaom, March 6th
Last week Badgeville unveiled their plans for a mobile gamification SDK for iOS and Android. The SDK will enable mobile developers to implement standard features such as badges and leaderboards but will also take advantage of mobile GPS systems to implement customized check-in systems. Deloitte has already started using the SDK’s geo-locating capabilities in an app to check in on their assignments. According the BadgeVille, the introduction of this gamification SDK will serve as a means of extending online communities into the mobile world with gamification features. Will mobile developers be able to implement gamification successfully or will every mobile app simply feature badges now?
City Peaks Game Tracks your Office Stair Hikes – Co.Design, March 8th
In an effort to increase physical activity, Design studio Digit created a competitive stair-walking game. Called City Peaks, the game compares office ascents to some of the highest heights in the city using RFID stations placed in the building. Walkers are able to track their cumulative distances and compete with others through the leaderboard system. Digit has reported walking a collective total of 7763 meters, an impressive 90% of Mt. Everest’s height. Really excellent use of gamification.
Empathetic Software Tailors Lessons to Emotions – MedicalNewsToday, March 5th
University of Notre Dame professor Sydney D’Mello and her colleagues have developed an educational tool called “AutoTutor” and “AffectiveAuto Tutor”.The AutoTutor software is able to detect the person using it, analyzing language, facial expressions, and even posture to generate customized teachings.The software essentially has technical conversations with the user to teach a variety of complex topics. The AutoTutor program is currently being tested for efficacy in a study but the AutoTutor team has claimed that the software has been improving grades approximately one letter grade. When considering the possibility of combining customized user experiences to game mechanics, there is some huge potential for other applications. It will be interesting to see how effective AutoTutor is when it is released.
GDC Talks Gamification – InformationWeek, March 6th
Developers in the Game IT Summit at GDC were discussing some new applications demonstrating the power of crowd-sourcing and gamification. Highlights included one assistant professor at McGill having developed a crowdsourced research game called Phylo, which features gene-puzzles for research on genetic diseases. Another was Project Augur, which has players solve simple puzzles to fine tune AI capabilities in software. Project Augur was a big success, generating 3600 user surveys for a mere cost of $470. These two were just a few examples of gamification discussed this week. Stay tuned later this week for another piece of gamification at GDC.
Image (C) – msaturlr
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“How different would our personal [parenting,] and professional lives be if, rather than viewing … endings as failures, we saw them as necessary steps for creating the possibility of something better?”
The most bittersweet ending in a parent’s life is itself a goal of parenting: the empty nest, when the emerging adult strikes out on fledgling wings.
Long before the first solo flight, what parent hasn’t struggled alongside a child, a tween and a teen over friendships old and new, in should we stay or should we go scenarios?
And nearly as often as we celebrate friends there is debate over which sport to quit—or start; when—and where.
All along, priority-setting of the ant and grasshopper variety: ‘don’t be too fond of sleep; you’ll end up in the poor house!’ and a time to work, a time to play usher life along, back and forth.
Those are the usual and customaries, but what about the biggies?
Relocation of your own family or a friend’s? Death? Divorce?
Before 2012 comes to an end Monday night, consider how endings are handled in your family? Are they delayed? Avoided? Embraced?
According to Dr. Cloud, ‘Endings are not a tragedy to be first feared and later regretted but a necessary stage on the way to growth, says clinical psychologist and bestselling author of The One-Life Solution. Endings are a crucial way to get what we desire by shedding those things whose time has passed. The author addresses the benefits of concluding unsatisfying work or personal relationships, and he advises readers on diagnosing when the situation can be resuscitated or must be shut down. This “pruning” process can spark readers out of passivity or paralysis, getting them motivated and energized for change… [and] the fresh start they crave.”
Two copies of Dr. Cloud’s Necessary Endings are available through the Chester County Library system.
When parent-leaders learn to press through necessary endings, and then lead their kids in doing the same, kids are positioned for productive adulthood, regardless of whether the auld lang synes are consistent and comfortable year after year, or life-changing.
Is anything ending for your family this year?
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When I was nine, I had a bad experience while in the hospital with scarlet fever. A nurse restrained me and abruptly poked a needle into my arm, inflicting a pain that felt worse than a bee sting. I avoided having blood taken for the next 20 years, even if it meant risking my health.
It used to be that modern medicine was a thing to be venerated, a doctor's words regarded like golden nectar of wisdom. Now, not so much. Once upon a time vaccinations were seen as miracles in a needle, warding off potentially life-threatening illnesses. In the States, the unvaccinating movement has turned epidemic, with as many as one in 10 parents refusing to vaccinate their children.
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Am Govt Homework 8 Answers - Student One
American Government and Politics: Lecture Eight Homework
Monday, November 19, 2012
The political “ground game” takes place when people actively work to cause other people to vote. When it is said that the Democrats won the ground game in the recent election, it means that their activity in encouraging people to vote was more extensive and more effective than the ground game of Republicans. They took advantage of the early voting system by encouraging Americans to send in their ballots, drove people to polling centers, and knocked on peoples’ doors, asking them to vote. While Republicans did this as well, Democrats played the ground game much harder, and it paid off.
- Your answer explains the important concept well.
Initiatives occur when people put new laws on the ballot by collecting signatures; once the proper amount of signatures is reached and a state official has reviewed the proposed law, it can be voted upon. (This is the direct initiative process. If the state legislature puts another competing law on the ballot, the initiative process is called indirect.)
Referenda, however, are different. Rather than putting new laws up for vote themselves, the people vote on laws put on the ballot by the state legislature (in the instance of legislative referenda) or vote in order to pass or repeal a law that has just been passed by the legislature (called popular referendum). This popular referendum vote only takes place, however, if a large enough number of signatures is collected within a period of (usually) 90 days after the legislature has passed the law. In conclusion, initiatives allow the people to put laws on the ballot themselves; referenda allow them to vote on laws that have been developed by the legislature.
- Excellent explanation.
I think that Obama won the election because many people support the controversial issues he stands for, such as abortion, homosexuality, feminism, etc., and they do not understand how poor his leadership is. A large number of Americans do not have a relationship with God or even a basic foundation in real moral values. Thus, they are more likely to be in favor of or neutral concerning homosexuality and abortion. Voters may also have been influenced by the feministic speakers at the Democratic convention and the Democrats’ claim that Republicans were the perpetrators of a “war on women.” The blindness of many people to moral decline and the lack of standards definitely helped our liberal president get another four years in which to lead our country in the wrong direction.
- "feministic" -> "feminist". Superb answer otherwise.
The government is “divided” when Republicans control part of it while Democrats control another. “Gridlock” can thus occur, when laws are not passed since Republicans and Democrats don’t agree on the laws being proposed. Generally, most of the Republicans will be either for or against a certain law, and most of the Democrats will take the opposite position. Thus, if the currently Republican-controlled House creates a new law, the Democrats in the Senate will probably not pass in, and vice-versa. While gridlock can be a problem, divided government is not always a bad thing, as it can prevent bad laws from being passed or from one party having total control of the government. If this were the case, the country would lose some of the balance that is so important for it to maintain.
- "not pass in" -> "not pass it." Excellent answer in substance.
New Jersey doesn’t allow initiatives, which is a good. Initiatives allow the people to put laws on the ballot; in some cases this might be beneficial, but in general this practice allows too much democracy—which is subject to the fickle whims of the people—in the government.
- "which is a good." -> "which is a good thing." The answer is good too.
No, it wasn’t a good idea for Governor Christie to praise Obama so much so close to the election. It is actually very surprising that he did so, considering his dislike for Obama and strong support of Romney. The ball game analogy is a good one…
Team Romney and team Obama are playing basketball; there are two minutes left on the clock and the score is tied. Because one of the Obama players had directed him to the water fountain earlier, a Romney player passes the ball to him. The Obama team member quickly dribbles to the other end of the court and scores the winning point of the game. The Romney player contributed to his team’s loss by inflating the other player’s kindness, which was nothing especially commendable since that he attended the school in which the game was held, while Team Romney did not.
In the same way, Christie made a bigger deal of Obama’s visit than he needed to; after all, the visit was perfectly reasonable considering that Obama is one of the most influential leaders of our country and therefore has some responsibility to care for the American people. Christie, an influential leader, over inflated the “approval ball” and then passed it to Obama—right in front of everyone else.
- One of the best answers in the class.
Ron Paul’s analysis was right. Many people receive funding from the government because of mental or physical conditions or because they are out of a job. Thus, when the election came up, did they vote for a candidate who was committed to turning the economy around and who might help them get a job? No. They voted for the candidate who would keep handing out free money, even though the country doesn’t have any. (Of course, it is an exaggeration to say that most people on government funding don’t want a job, but some people do like it that way.) He was also right in saying that it’s a bad sign that there are so many people receiving money from the government—it’s not just bad, it is frightening, too.
- Excellent analysis.
Referendum occurs in two ways: legislative referendum and popular referendum. Legislative referendum takes place when the legislature puts a law on the ballot for the people to vote upon. Popular referendum, on the other hand, allows the people repeal a law that has been passed by the legislature in the past (normally) 90 days if they can collect enough signatures to put it on the ballot. I like popular referendum better than legislative referendum. Legislative referendum hands the people an opportunity for “dangerous democracy,” while popular referendum makes them work harder for an opportunity to directly impact laws. At the same time, it does give them this opportunity, which occasionally can be a good thing if a truly oppressive or bad law is passed.
- Good description, although a popular referendum can be harmful in some important cases, as when it is used to repeal a much-needed pro-life law.
The thought that the Democrats are planning to change the filibuster rule for their own devices is frightening. As much as I wish that conservatives controlled the country, I recognize that our country was built on balance. If, as in the cases of so many governments, it was possible for one political group or one person to have total control over the nation, the United States would not have prospered as well as it has. If the Democrats manage to change the rule so that they can easily close filibusters, the balance maintained by our currently divided government will be sorely upturned.
- Good choice of an important topic in the lecture, and an excellent discussion of it.
- Total score: 90/90. Perfect homework.--Andy Schlafly 20:35, 23 November 2012 (EST)
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* Creates a voluntary system for candidates for Secretary of State to qualify for a public campaign grant if they agree to limitations on spending and private contributions.
* Candidates would have to qualify before receiving the grant.
* Candidates who demonstrate sufficient public support would receive the same amount.
* Participating candidates would be prohibited from raising or spending money beyond the grant.
* There would be strict enforcement and accountability with published reports open to the public.
* Funded by voluntary contributions and a biennial fee on lobbyists, lobbying firms, and lobbyist employers.
SUMMARY OF LEGISLATIVE ANALYST'S ESTIMATE OF NET STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT FISCAL IMPACT
* Increased revenues (mostly from charges on lobbyists, lobbying firms, and lobbyist employers) totaling over $6 million every four years. These funds would be spent on public financing for campaigns of Secretary of State candidates for the 2014 and 2018 elections.
Ban on Public Funds to Pay for Campaigns. State law bans the use of public funds for political candidates' campaigns. This ban extends to all elected offices at the state level and most elected offices at the local level. (Using powers that they already have under the State Constitution, a small number of charter cities have created programs for the public financing of candidates for certain local offices.)
Entities That Oversee Campaign Finance Laws. The state's campaign finance laws are administered by the Fair Political Practices Commission (commission) and the Secretary of State. Under state law, individuals and groups must disclose how much money has been given, received, and spent on political campaigns. This information is available to the public on the Secretary of State's Web site. The commission monitors candidates and donors, and it can assess fines on candidates and donors who violate election laws.
Lobbyist Registration Administered by Secretary of State. The Secretary of State is elected statewide every four years and serves as the state's chief elections official. The Secretary of State also has other duties, such as monitoring activities of lobbyists. Lobbying is the act of communicating directly with public officials in order to influence governmental actions on behalf of the lobbyist's employer or client. Every two years, lobbyists, lobbying firms, and lobbyist employers must register with the Secretary of State. There is currently a $25 fee related to each lobbyist to cover the administrative expenses of registration.
* Lifts the ban on public funding for political campaigns.
* Establishes a public funding system for campaigns for the office of Secretary of State.
* Requires lobbyists to pay higher charges for this public campaign funding.
Lifts the Ban on Public Funding for Political Campaigns
- This measure eliminates the ban on using public funding for political campaigns for elected office. This would allow the Legislature - and, in some cases, city, county, and other local elected policy makers - to create public financing programs in the future. As described below, this measure creates a public financing program only for the office of Secretary of State.
Establishes Public Funding System for Secretary of State Campaigns
- Public Funding Levels and Requirements for Primary Election Campaigns
$5 Qualifying Contributions.
- Funding for Eligible Candidates in Primary Elections...Participating candidates competing for a major party's nomination would receive a base level of funding of $1 million for the primary election. These candidates would receive additional funds ("matching funds") to equal the money spent by nonparticipating candidates or outside groups trying to influence the election. Participating candidates could receive up to an additional $4 million of these matching funds for the primary. For example, if a nonparticipating candidate were to raise and spend $3 million and another interest group were to spend $2 million in favor of the nonparticipating candidate, the participating candidate would be eligible to receive $5 million - $1 million in base funding, and $4 million in matching funds. Eligible candidates from minor parties would receive $200,000 in base funding. These minor party candidates also could receive the matching funds described above - up to an additional $800,000 - if they demonstrate broader support by collecting 15,000 qualifying contributions (a total of $75,000) instead of 3,750.
- Winning a Party's Primary Election. In order to receive public financing for a general election campaign, a party candidate must have participated in the public financing program in the primary election campaign. Candidates who participate in the public financing program in the primary election must follow program rules if they proceed to the general election.
- Independent Candidates. Independent candidates - that is, those not affiliated with any party - would not have participated in a primary election. These candidates must collect 15,000 qualifying contributions to receive the same level of public financing in the general election as major party candidates who participate.
- Funding for Eligible Candidates in General Election. The base level of funding for major party candidates and independent or minor party candidates demonstrating broader support is $1.3 million for the general election campaign. Similar to the primary election campaign, eligible candidates would receive additional matching funds to equal the money spent by nonparticipating candidates or outside groups trying to influence the election. Eligible candidates could receive up to an additional $5.2 million of these matching funds. Other eligible candidates from minor parties would only receive $325,000 in base funding.
- Other Requirements to Receive Public Funds for Campaigns
To receive public funds for the primary or general election campaign, candidates for Secretary of State would have to follow new rules and requirements described below.
- Private Contributions Restricted. To receive public funding, a candidate could not accept private campaign funding, with four main exceptions:
- * First, candidates must collect the $5 qualifying contributions. (These qualifying contributions would be deposited into the fund supporting the public financing program, as described below.)
* Second, beginning 18 months prior to a primary election, candidates could collect and spend start-up contributions, or "seed money." (These funds could be spent, for example, to pay costs for collecting the qualifying contributions.) The measure restricts seed money contributions to $100 for each registered voter, and total contributions would be limited to $75,000 per campaign.
* Third, candidates could accept a certain amount of contributions from political parties - 5 percent of the base level of public funds in each of the primary election and the general election - that is, up to $50,000 for the primary election campaign, and $65,000 for the general election campaign.
* Fourth, in the event that the program did not have enough funds to give to eligible candidates, candidates could raise from private donors the difference between what they were entitled to receive from the state and what they actually received.
Use of Funds. The public funds could only be used for direct campaign expenses. The measure contains various restrictions to prevent funds from being used for other purposes.
Other Requirements. Publicly funded candidates also would be subject to other requirements. For example, they would have to participate in debates with other candidates before each election and submit campaign expenditure records to the commission. In addition, aside from initial seed money, candidates could not use their personal funds to pay for campaign costs or raise funds for other candidates in other campaigns or for political parties.
Smaller Awards if There Are Insufficient Funds. If the commission determines that there is not enough money in the program to fund all eligible candidates, the commission would reduce the grants proportionately to all eligible candidates. If there are insufficient funds, participating candidates would be allowed to raise money up to the amount that they were entitled to receive from the public financing program.
Rules for Those Not in the Public Funding Program. Secretary of State candidates could choose not to participate in the public funding program. As soon as a nonparticipating candidate begins to spend more than the base amount of funding for participating candidates, the nonparticipating candidate must report his or her campaign spending to the commission electronically within 24 hours. Other individuals or groups that spend more than $2,500 in a year to influence the outcome of the Secretary of State's race also must report such spending within 24 hours.
Amounts Adjusted by Inflation. Every four years, the commission would adjust seed money limitations and public funding amounts for the program by the rate of inflation.
Expires January 1, 2019. This measure would end public financing for Secretary of State campaigns on January 1, 2019. Public financing, therefore, would be in place for the 2014 and 2018 elections. The Legislature, however, could extend this expiration date by passing a bill signed by the Governor.
Interaction With Other Measure on the June 2010 Ballot. Proposition 14 on this ballot would change the primary and general election process for state offices, including for the Secretary of State.
PROPOSITION 14 AND THIS MEASURE
If approved, Proposition 14 - a constitutional amendment also on this ballot - would change the primary and general election system for state offices, including Secretary of State. Proposition 14 makes changes that could conflict with the proposed statutory provisions of the public campaign funding system under this measure. For example, a potential conflict is this measure's linking of certain funding decisions to participation in a partisan primary election, which would no longer exist if Proposition 14 were to pass.
If both measures pass, conflicting provisions of these two measures would have to be reconciled through additional legislation, judicial action, or a future ballot measure.
REQUIRES LOBBYISTS TO PAY HIGHER CHARGES
Fair Elections Fund Established. The public funds for Secretary of State campaigns would be paid out of a new Fair Elections Fund, which would be funded by increased charges on lobbyists, qualifying contributions, potential voluntary tax check-off donations (on state personal income tax forms), and other sources.
Increases Charges Related to Lobbyists. This measure requires charges for lobbyists, lobbyist firms, and lobbyist employers of $700 every two years. The measure requires that these charges be adjusted by the rate of inflation in the future. These charges likely would be the main source of money for the public funding program. As of January 2010, over 4,300 individuals and groups were registered as lobbyists, lobbying firms, or lobbyist employers. If similar numbers of registrations were to occur in the future, this source of revenue would raise about $6 million every four-year election cycle.
Administrative Costs. The measure allows up to 10 percent of all money deposited to the Fair Election Fund every four years to pay for administering the public funding program. Such funds would be paid to the Secretary of State's office, the commission, and other departments with new duties under this measure.
New State Revenues. We estimate that this measure would raise more than $6 million every four years. This includes funds from the lobbyist charge, as well as qualifying contributions. This amount would grow with inflation in future years. It is possible that other revenues would be generated from voluntary tax check-off donations and other sources.
New State Costs. The new funds would pay for costs associated with the measure. The costs paid from the new Fair Elections Fund to administer this measure could not exceed 10 percent of moneys deposited into the fund - about $600,000 every four years. The remaining funds would be available for candidates for Secretary of State who choose to receive public funds for their political campaigns. The amount of spending on the public funding of Secretary of State election campaigns would depend on a number of factors and vary from election to election. Among the factors affecting this spending would be:
* The number of candidates accepting public funds.
* The amount of money spent by candidates not receiving public funds (which would be a factor in determining the level of any additional matching funds payments).
Based on the amount of campaign spending for Secretary of State candidates in recent elections, total costs would most likely be between $5 million and $8 million per campaign. If there are not sufficient funds available to provide all candidates with the amounts envisioned under the measure, public funding provided to the candidates would have to be reduced so that overall expenses do not exceed the funds available to the program.
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Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:36
Following the conclusion of the elementary football regular season on Saturday, the Clay County Elementary School playoffs are scheduled to begin Tuesday evening at Tiger Stadium.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:37
Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:35
Rockets, Wildcats Cruise to Tuesday Night Wins
Elementary school football action continued Tuesday night, with Coach Martin Bowling's Goose Rock Rockets remaining undefeated after besting Big Creek in Tuesday's opening game.
In the Elementary School Game of the Week, Coach Mark Jackson’s #4 ranked Manchester Tigers nearly pulled off an upset over the defending county champion Burning Springs Bobcats.
The Bobcats, however, were able to will their way to a victory, following some gutsy play on both sides of the ball for a 16-14 win Tuesday night at Tiger Stadium.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:36
Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:33
Seventh Grade Raiders Rebound From Conference Loss
CCMS Raider football eighth graders (From L to R) Travis Williams, Nathan Sizemore, and Colby NIcholson discuss strategy with teammate Adam Smith (seated) during the eighth grade team's 56-12 win over Corbin.
Two different football teams took the field this past week for the Clay County Middle School Raider seventh grade team.
Last Thursday, the seventh grade squad was dominated by conference foe Corbin, in a game that seventh grade Head Coach Chris Byrd described as “effortless”.
Monday night, however, the seventh grade team put up 334 total offensive yards, en route to a 36-12 thrashing over host Knox County to improve to 5-2 on the year.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:34
Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:32
Coach Lisa Nolan’s Red Bird Middle School girls’ basketball team suffered a tough loss Monday night, falling to visiting Lynn Camp 28-20.
The Lady Cardinals struggled in the first half, getting outscored by the visiting team 18-7 through the first half.
Kaley Collett scored all seven of Red Bird’s first half points.
The Lady Cards bounced back, cutting the lead to six, 22-16, at the end of the third quarter.
But Lynn Camp stormed back, outscoring the Lady Cardinals 8-4 in the fourth for the 28-20 win.
Collett led all scorers in the game with 11 points.
Kassidy Collett pitched in four points, while Kerryngton Asher and Chelsea Collett rounded out the scoring with three and two points, respectively.
Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 September 2011 03:33
Wednesday, 21 September 2011 22:27
Hacker Edges Defending Champs, ‘The Rock’ Cruises, Indians Pick Up Second Win
Hacker's Kenyan Combs breaks free to score the only score of Saturday's game between #3 Hacker and #2 Burning Springs.
Three teams in the Clay County elementary football league secured shutout victories Saturday afternoon at Tiger Stadium as Hacker, Goose Rock, and Big Creek each picked up impressive wins.
In the elementary football game of the week, Coach Jeff Woods’ Hacker Wildcats picked up a huge win over #2 ranked Burning Springs.
Last Updated on Thursday, 22 September 2011 12:10
Page 5 of 18
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"The Daily Texan" (University of Texas--Austin), 6/1/1997 ==================== 06/01/1997 Church of Scientology based on fiction but should be left alone Roahn Wynar TEXAN COLUMNIST The Church of Scientology (COS) may be a crackpot cult but nevertheless it should be left alone.
Earlier this month, the German government stepped up its longtime feud with the church by putting it under "public notice of official surveillance."
The German government correctly assumes the COS is trying to infiltrate and use the state apparatus to promote Scientology. The church has a history of such activity. In the seventies, COS members infiltrated U.S. government offices and destroyed records pertaining to their activities. As a result, COS founder L. Ron Hubbard's wife was jailed.
However, the German government is wrong to actively stifle any organization. They should be far more frightened of limiting free expression than of citizens getting wrapped up in stupid ideas.
Without crackpots, freedom of expression is just no fun.
Without a doubt, Scientology is not a religion. COS makes specific claims about the physical world that are falsifiable. Religion is based on faith, not science. Specifically, COS claims individuals "cleared" through sufficient "auditing" have many amazing talents -- see outstanding actor and Scientologist John Travolta in Phenomenon.
Those who reach the exalted level of Operating Thetan, the scientologist's highest level of advancement, claim to have even more powers: telepathy, self-healing and astral projection.
Don't expect to see demonstrations, though. The E-meter, a device used to identify the presence of emotional traumas called "engrams," is basically a resistor network with the scientologist as one of the resistors. A religion that is based on a resistor network is in trouble from the start. The overall gist of the Scientology space opera is faith based: Evil warlord named Xenu solves overpopulation by compressing everyone into a Hawaiian volcano 25 trillion years ago, Galactic Federation is destroyed etc. A story no more or less falsifiable or logical than other religions. L. Ron Hubbard is important because he figured out how to break the "implant" that Xenu put in our brains. This "implant" is the source of all our personal problems.
German government is wrong: Scientology is not particularly dangerous to the German government. The Parliament fears a Scientology assimilation of the German people modeled after events of the early thirties. Thus they forbid Scientologists from becoming members of Parliament. The U.S. Navy has been infiltrated by a cult called Total Quality Management (TQM) based on the teachings of manager/author W.
Edwards Deming. TQM is a "human performance" cult that promises big gains in productivity and labor harmony if you buy hundreds of copies of his book and attend his seminars or hire consultants. It has gotten so bad in the Navy that each unit has been required to designate a TQM officer whose job it is to preach "Deming" method. The Navy is still going strong despite zillions of lost people -- hours pursuing "TQM education." Why doesn't Germany crack down on this obvious money grubbing farce?
German government is correct: Scientology saps the energy and money of anyone it can. It takes tens of thousands of dollars to complete the higher levels of COS auditing. Many members who don't have the cash gladly work for COS and pay with labor and time.
Freedom of expression provides color to a culture. No government can protect someone from ideas, good or bad. So as the German agents dress up as the needy and the gullible and suffer through hours and hours of auditing to get inside, we can relax in America knowing that when the FBI took its agents off of Dr. Martin Luther King, it probably sent them into COS and they have been there ever since -- secretly, of course.
Wynar is a graduate student in physics.
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What is the establishment so afraid of? Within the past few months there has developed an extraordinarily vitriolic campaign against medical savings accounts. From Congress, the media, and the insurance establishment, this consumer-based health care reform has been denounced with ever rising hysteria.
The New York Times, which over the last three years could barely manage to mention MSAs, suddenly devoted three stories within a month to the alleged dangers of giving patients control over their health care. A variety of publications, from the New Republic to Rolling Stone, announced that they were shocked —shocked! — to discover that Golden Rule Insurance Company, a proponent of MSAs, had made campaign contributions to several Republican candidates. A PBS special echoed the same theme. Amidst ad hominem attacks on Golden Rule’s business practices, there were ominous hints at political payoffs. Curiously, not a word was said about the millions of dollars being spent by the managed care insurance industry to defeat MSAs.
Meanwhile, many members of Congress who had previously supported legislation that included MSAs, such as Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), announced that they were now unalterably opposed to the concept, even at the price of scuttling any attempt at health care reform this year. President Clinton threatened to veto any health care reform bill that included MSAs.
The question is, why? Economists from across the political spectrum understand that one of the major factors driving health care costs is our third-party payment system that insulates consumers from the cost of their health care decisions. MSAs would establish an incentive for consumers to act more responsibly in purchasing health care services. There are numerous studies that show that health care consumers can and do make cost-conscious decisions when given a financial incentive to do so. For example, the RAND Corporation conducted a study of changes in people’s health care decision-making in relation to the size of the consumer’s copayment. The study found that an individual who had to pay 50 percent of the cost of health care spent 25 percent less than an individual with no copayment. The study also showed that, contrary to the assertions of some critics, those reduced expenditures are not caused by individuals’ forgoing truly necessary health care. (Health outcomes were virtually identical.) Rather, the savings result from reduced utilization of optional services and cost-based selection among competing providers.
Moreover, health expenses paid out of an MSA would entail no insurance administrative cost. Insurance is a very inefficient way to pay for small or routine health expenses. It costs approximately as much to process a $50 claim as it does to process a $50,000 claim. MSAs would cut insurance companies out of the vast majority of health care transactions. That would reduce both the overall cost of health care and the paperwork burden on doctors.
MSAs would also increase the quality of medical care by strengthening the relationship between the physician and the patient. One of the great tragedies of medicine today is that the medical ethic, according to which the doctor is responsible to the patient, has been replaced by a veterinaryethic, according to which the doctor is responsible not to the patient but to whoever is paying the bill. MSAs would reverse that trend.
Finally, while MSAs are not a “silver bullet” that would instantly solve the problem of Americans without health insurance, they would be a major step on the road to universal access. Of the 39 million Americans who lack health insurance, half are uninsured for four months or less, 70 percent for one year or less. MSAs would provide these individuals with a pool of money with which to pay health care and health insurance costs during those short uninsured spells. Moreover, because MSAs belong to the individual and are completely portable, there is no longer the fear that the loss of a job leads to the loss of insurance.
The campaign against medical savings accounts is really just a continuation of the battle over the Clinton health care plan. The fight over MSAs is fundamentally about control. They give control to patients and physicians. Advocates of national health care understand that once MSAs are passed, their hopes for a government-run health care system will be over. Insurance companies understand that MSAs represent a roadblock to insurance domination of the health care system.
It would be a shame if naked self-interest or ideological zeal prevented genuine, consumer-oriented health care reform.
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14 Inch Prints Near Hudson Bay
According to UPI, large footprints have been found in a forest on the shores of Hudson Bay in Canada, indicating that Bigfoot may be living there.
Each footprint ?was 14 inches or so [long] and five inches wide,? according to Abraham Hunter, chief of the Weemusk First Nation in Peawanuck in Ontario, about 1,000 miles north of Toronto. There ?were quite a few of them, more than twenty? and they headed toward the Winisk River. They were about 2 yards apart, indicating that the creature had a very large stride, and they were definitely not bear tracks. ?A bear would have 4 different footprints,? says Hunter.
The prints were first sighted by a member of the tribe as he drove a 4-wheeler through the Polar Bear Provincial Park, one of Ontario?s largest wildlife preserves. Since then, several other people from the Weemusk Nation have examined the prints.
The creature left no hair on any shrubs as it passed by, but the footprints sank deeply into the soil, indicating that it was big and heavy. ?It?s not just in one area? that the footprints were sighted, says Hunter. ?There?s about 3 different areas, one about 2 miles away and another 1.25 miles away.?
The creature has even been seen. ?About 20 years ago, there was a sighting about 15 or 12.5 miles downstream,? says Hunter. The next day, people in the area went to the spot and ?did find footprints, 16 inches in length. It looked like a man? and was ?heading toward the bush.?
An area supervisor for the Ontario Natural Resources Ministry, along with two other people, went to the spot where the new footprints were found and took photographs. ?They are sending the photographs down for us to have a look,? says Brett Kelly, who works for the ministry in Toronto. ?Apparently, there have been 16 other sightings in the province of Ontario.? While the officials were in the Peawanuck area, ?our ministry staff saw a second set [of prints] 93 miles east.
?There was a sighting last year, in 1999, and a previous sighting to that in the western part of the province,? he adds. Of the latest sighting, he says, ?I think it?s quite heavy, because it left quite a deep footprint, but there?s no estimation of what the actual size of it is.?
To read more about the Florida skunk ape track pictured above, click here.
NOTE: This news story, previously published on our old site, will have any links removed.
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How to Make a Compost Pile in Your Backyard
Composting is the perfect way to recycle biodegradable material, and because it’s easy to do, you can do your part to help the planet by taking relatively little time out of your day to make a compost pile. Composting is also a wonderful way to help you save money on fertilizer, and it can be an activity that brings the whole family together. Follow these simple steps to make a backyard compost pile.
Step 1: Find a dry, shady area for your compost pile
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, water is a necessary ingredient for compost. If your compost pile is in too bright of a spot, water will quickly dry up. However, a compost pile that is too moist is a problem too. For this reason, choose a dry area under a tree or within a building’s shade.
Step 2: Begin adding ingredients
The Environmental Protection Agency notes that, in addition to water, compost piles need brown and green ingredients to survive. Green ingredients are generally organic compost, food scraps like fruit peels and coffee grounds. Brown ingredients consist of paper, dead leaves, etc. Collect these items for composting, and add them to the compost pile. The Environmental Protection Agency reminds composters to shred large materials, like pieces of cardboard.
Step 3: Make sure to add enough water
The Environmental Protection Agency recommends adding moisture when you add dry items. If you have too many dry items, you won’t make compost. But be careful that you don’t add a monsoon! You want just enough to keep the compost moist.
Step 4: Blend materials
Once you’ve added a good amount of greens and browns to your home compost pile, the EPA recommends that you use a pitchfork to bury fruit and vegetable materials under at least 10 inches of other material. You can also add grass clippings at this point.
Step 5: Wait
This is the easiest part of making your backyard compost pile! The EPA states that making compost takes between two months and two years. The agency notes that when the material at the bottom of your pile is dark black, your compost is ready to be used as fertilizer.
Step 6: Repeat
You’ll always have kitchen scraps and grass clippings, so don’t make a backyard compost pile once and decide you’re done. Instead, repeat the process, and you’ll help the environment by reducing the size of your local landfill, and you'll always have good fertilizer.
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Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, once married, then divorced, will be reunited in London’s National Portrait Gallery after a portrait of the devoutly Catholic queen was discovered in Lambeth Palace according to the Jan. 25, Guardian.
“A portrait always thought to be of Catherine Parr, Henry's sixth wife who survived him, was in fact a depiction of the other Catherine – his first wife and the one his quest to divorce led to the titanic split with the Catholic church,” the London-based newspaper reported.
The portrait was discovered hanging in a private sitting room of the official residence of the archbishop of Canterbury. The find, which the NPG's Charlotte Bolland called "an exciting discovery," was made while on a mission to research a portrait of William Warham, the archbishop of Canterbury who joined Henry and Catherine in holy matrimony in 1509.
Beginning Jan. 25, the portrait of Catherine of Aragon, on loan to the NPG for five years, will be displayed in Room 1 at the National Portrait Gallery - reunited with a portrait of Henry VIII.
Hanging next to the unhappy couple is the other woman, Anne Boleyn, who was Henry's second wife until she met an untimely death - by beheading, in 1536.
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Ever wish you could really dance with Tracy Turnblad or ask Hermione Granger for help with your homework? Do you secretly think a real life Luna Lovegood or Elizabeth Bennet would make the perfect BFF? In honor of Women's History Month, here are female characters we'd love to come alive so we could hang out together.
- Katniss Everdeen
The Hunger Games tribute is the kind of girl you'd like to bring on a camping trip—of doom. Loyal, smart, and resourceful she knows her way around a bow and completely demolishes the notion of fighting, "like a girl."
The Disney heroine risked her life to save her father, proving along the way she can fight just as well as the guys and stratigize better than most.
- Tracy Turnblad
The musical Hairspray's main diva reminds us to stand up against discrimination. Dancing is just for a certain body type? Nope. Separation is okay? Super nope.
- Jenna Hamilton
MTV's Awkward shows us a just-plain-awesome high school student. Even when she's blackmailing, she's blackmailing for the right reasons.
- Mercedes Jones
GLEE's songstress has proven herself to be a great friend to both Quinn and Kurt. She can also take care of herself (careful though, she'll bust the windows out your car).
- Kat Stratford
10 Things I Hate About You's main gal doesn't care what people think of her, which means she'll kick butt at soccer and read feminist prose if she wants to.
- Amy Farrah Fowler
With a PhD in neurobiology, The Big Bang Theory's brainy character could definitely help you with your science project. And as proved by her devotion to her (kind of) BFF Penny, she might also help you put your personal life.
- Hermione Granger
In the world of Harry Potter Ron is there for comic relief, Harry for guts, and Hermione for everything else. Yes, her intelligence and work ethic means she's a star student, but she also gets an A+ in life.
- Elizabeth Bennet
At a time when women were completely financially dependent on men, the novel Pride and Prejudice's protagonist values love and loyalty over money. She reminds us: don't settle, in work, friendship, or love.
Proving even X-Men superheroes have fears, Storm conquered her claustrophobia and talks a leadership role among the mutants. And she can control the weather. That's a plus.
- Luna Lovegood
The heart of a lion, the blood pressure of a sloth. Harry Potter's Luna is all about staring down evil with complete calm, all while wearing awesome accessories.
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But this shift won’t be easy. Ten years ago, all of the major music labels knew they could sell music online, but they didn’t want to — it wasn’t in their interest. It took an outsider, Steve Jobs, to force the labels to act together and agree to do this. But now, Jobs and iTunes are in the same boat. A licensing model in which people were charged a small fee each time they listened to a song, for instance, would suddenly put iTunes in a much more competitive marketplace. And the notion of licensing copyrighted material would disrupt a lot of other incumbents, even the new ones. It would be really bad for Google, for example, which makes its money by collecting and disseminating other people’s information and putting its own ads around it. But in a licensing model, Google would have to pay for that information, too.
S+B: Have you tried to adopt content-sharing ideas in your own work?
MASON: I’m talking to my publishers about giving away a free e-book version of The Pirate’s Dilemma, which I think would be a really great marketing strategy and would actually help us sell more physical copies of the book. But they’ve been very cautious about doing that because it’s a huge change for them in terms of how they think about what they sell and what they do. In fact, book publishing is a really good example of the pirate’s dilemma. From the author’s point of view, the threat really isn’t piracy; it’s obscurity. Two hundred thousand books are published every year, and the average book sells 500 copies. Against those odds you need as many people reading your book as possible. One of the best ways to do that is to give away an electronic copy in the hopes that people will read it and talk about it, and that it will generate a buzz that leads to the sale of physical copies.
When authors offer free versions of their books, one of two things typically happens. Either people like the book and the pirate copy helps sell print copies or people don’t like the book and so they don’t pay to download it or buy the print version. What is lost by downloading a free version of the book?
Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, recently said that he had been leaking his own books to BitTorrent (a peer-to-peer downloading site) behind his publisher’s back, and that this had been helping him sell books. He has since created a Web site where his books can be downloaded for free. In Russia, after he made a Russian translation of The Alchemist available on his Web site, Coelho went from selling 1,000 physical copies of The Alchemist a year to selling 1 million copies of all of his books within three years. Now he sells 10 million books a year in Russia.
S+B: Are there any industries that you believe are adapting well to the threat from piracy?
MASON: Yes, the fashion industry. In 2006, Congress began considering extending copyright protection to fashions — which had never before been protected — to try and bring them more in line with European laws, which are designed to protect smaller companies from having their designs stolen immediately by large retailers. Yet even during this reevaluation it was universally accepted that piracy is literally how the fashion industry innovates. Because people are able to copy the 3-D design of garments, they can create trends. And because those trends can be disseminated so quickly and the new rapidly becomes old, we have seasons in fashion. This allows the fashion industry to sell more clothes than if individuals could protect their designs for a long time and trends lasted a couple of years rather than a couple of months. The problem now is that copying is happening so fast in fashion that people are losing sight of the original.
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William Galston discusses institutional reforms to make government work more effectively.
the time is ripe to push for new fiscal institutions to engage in a long-overdue rethinking of the rules shaping fiscal decisionmaking, to consolidate certain related government functions within unified bureaucratic structures and undo earlier consolidations that have failed, and to adopt measures aimed at depolarizing American politics, including reforms to the judicial confirmation process and to the congressional redistricting system.
If I think of myself as a customer, I am probably more dissatisfied with the performance of my local, state, and national government than I am with 90 percent of the businesses with which I deal. Why is that?
Fundamentally, I think that the answer lies in the nature of competition. Businesses compete for consumers on the basis of results. Governments are monopolies, and political competition is only loosely related to results. Voice is much less effective than exit.
To improve their performance, corporations often take steps that involve subtraction. They exit some businesses. They forego some markets in order to focus on others. They shut down ineffective divisions, fire ineffective managers, and lay off unneeded workers. Government almost never subtracts.
I am afraid that most people hold childish views of the determinants of organizational performance. They see it as a matter of will, or what I call "sufficient moral authority." When the electric utility Pepco does not deliver the service they expect, they think in terms of moral outrage rather than economics.
Sadly, some of the most well-educated people in the world are also the most childish. I give Galston credit for trying to start an adult conversation.
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In another book, The Rise of Marco Rubio, the journalist Manuel Roig-Franzia reveals that Papa was also, for a time, an undocumented immigrant. After fleeing Cuba in 1962, he was detained at the Miami airport and later ordered deported. But he was never sent home, and eventually he qualified for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, which still ensures Cuban refugees special treatment in the U.S. Rubio says he never knew his grandfather had lived in the U.S. illegally. But he told TIME that Papa’s situation illustrated the moral quandaries surrounding immigration, which he wrestles with today.
“He didn’t have a legal right to be here, but America wasn’t going to deport an elderly man to a communist dictatorship,” Rubio says. “It equates to these kids who were brought here when they were 5 or 6 and have no memory of the country where they were born. America is a compassionate country that says, ‘Let’s help these folks.’ But you have to do it in a way that doesn’t encourage people to bring their kids in the future, so they can get the same benefit. It’s complicated.”
Rubio’s journey on the issue has been complicated too. As a state legislator from the overwhelmingly Hispanic community of West Miami, he supported legislation that would allow undocumented students to qualify for in-state tuition. After being selected as house speaker in 2005, he scuttled several Republican efforts to crack down on undocumented immigrants. The obscure book he published laying out his agenda, 100 Innovative Ideas for Florida’s Future, included three ideas for preventing identity theft and zero about immigration.
But when he announced his underdog campaign for the Senate in 2010, Rubio became a hard-liner. He attacked then governor Charlie Crist’s support for reform as Obama-friendly liberal amnesty and opposed the Dream Act, which would have given legal status to those sympathetic immigrants brought here as kids. He started out 30 points behind, with the GOP establishment lined up behind the moderate Crist. While immigration wasn’t the big issue in the primary—Crist had embraced the Obama stimulus and even literally embraced Obama at a stimulus rally—it helped convince the party’s base of older, exurban Tea Partyers that the hip-hop-loving Cuban American was one of them. Crist was forced to quit the party to run as an independent. Rubio still buried him in the GOP midterm landslide and captured more than half the Hispanic vote.
In 2012, Rubio edged back toward compassion, proposing a scaled-back Dream Act. But before he could introduce a bill, the Obama Administration stole his thunder by unilaterally granting temporary legal status to the so-called Dreamers. That helped revive enthusiasm for Obama among Hispanics annoyed by the Administration’s record number of deportations. Romney ended up with a meager 27% of the Hispanic vote; had he matched Bush’s 40% share, he might be President today. His thrashing persuaded many Republican elites that as long as they’re perceived as unsympathetic obstacles to fixing a dysfunctional immigration system, the fastest-growing sector of the electorate won’t listen to anything they say.
Rubio is careful not to oversell immigration reform’s potential to revive the GOP brand: “If anyone is under the illusion that suddenly our percentage of Hispanic voters will double, let me dissuade them of that right now.” But he says many Hispanic Americans are forming their political identity in an era of Big Government and won’t even consider Republican arguments against it. “They’ve bought into the lie the left is putting out there that because we want to enforce immigration laws, we’re not welcoming,” he says. “It’s not true. It’s not fair. But it is what it is.” It’s no accident that Cubans, who enjoy more lenient rules than other immigrants, are more receptive to the GOP—or that non-Cuban Hispanics don’t always consider a Cuban-American politician one of them.
Now he wants to reform the system for all immigrants, and his impeccably nuanced positions have become the core of the Senate plan. He agrees that there is no way to round up and deport 11 million people living in the shadows, but he worries that excessive generosity could end up attracting 11 million more. So he backs a path to citizenship—the current situation, he says, amounts to “de facto amnesty”—but only if the borders are secure and an employment-verification system is in place first, and then only if it isn’t quicker or easier than the path for applicants who play by the rules. And while he is willing to grant probationary legal status to undocumented immigrants who register and pay fines, he insists they go to the back of the line for green cards and refuses to allow them to collect food stamps or other federal benefits.
Obama has announced similar principles, but Rubio has still blasted him for soft-pedaling the need to step up enforcement, among other issues. Some of this is Beltway theater; reform could become toxic for Republicans if it’s perceived as Obama-friendly. But there also will be very real differences over details involving guest farmworkers, high-skilled immigrants, same-sex couples and the path to citizenship itself. It’s a lot easier to agree that wait times should be reasonable or that the border should be secure than to draft legislation determining what those things mean. This shrewd political operator will have to decide how far he’s willing to bend to get a deal done with Obama or whether he’s content just to get credit for trying.
How It Is
Rubio still teaches a class at Florida International University, and one recent morning he was telling his students—almost all Hispanic immigrants or children of immigrants—how politics really works. His topic was the Florida House of Representatives, and he didn’t need notes to explain why the legislative body he once led is so partisan and polarized. “If you know the only way to lose your seat is to get out-conservatived in a primary, you’ll never let anyone get to your right,” Rubio said. He’s clearly a political animal. “I’m not telling you this is how it should be,” he said with a grin. “But it’s how it is. This isn’t a good-government class. This is a politics class.”
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During the April 1994 DFOSC observing run, spectra of 21 E and S0 galaxies in HydraI were obtained. The instrumental setup is described in Table (p. ). The data were subsequently reduced by Inger Jørgensen. This chapter describes these reductions. It also describes how the DFOSC data were supplemented with data from the literature to yield the table of available HydraI spectroscopy, presented in section .
Properties of E and S0 Galaxies in the Clusters HydraI and Coma
Master's Thesis, University of Copenhagen, July 1997
Bo Milvang-Jensen (email@example.com)
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Concern by Mackenzie: What really should an American exchange student heading to France know about?
I am considering of being a brief phrase (3-six weeks) trade student to France in the summertime. I would are living with a host family members and do no matter what they do. What should I know about french way of life and what they would anticipate/be offended by/want me to do? My French is simple, but I will be examining a great deal a lot more ahead of I go.
Answer by reinaldok_2000
There is no cause that you really should not have a excellent time in France and have an expertise you will never fail to remember. Just don’t forget that France is their region, French is their language and they are a very happy individuals. Usually be courteous and keep in mind to constantly greet them appropriately, even if you are just getting a baguette. In no way raise your voice and do not actually act like several foreigners who imagine that you can begin a dialogue by loudly inquiring a issue in English. Your fundamental French must be of wonderful assistance. Remember these tiny basic issues will drastically aid you and also the eighty million who will check out France this calendar year.
What do you believe? Solution below!
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Anthony Dukes, transportation planning manager for the Three Rivers Regional Commission, presented the study idea to the city commissioners at Tuesday’s workshop. Dukes said the transit feasibility study would help determine if the county needs to expand the current rural transit system or move to a urbanized transit formula.
The current system has 4-5 buses, Dukes said. The county, he said, “has been banking the transit money for a few years and there’s about $1 million, but we have to do the study first to unlock that money.”
He said the funds can be used with an 80/20 match for equipment or as a 50/50 match for operating the system. “We have to do the study to see what the potential is.”
City Manager Kenny Smith admitted to being “a little jaded by these studies. I wanted your input,” he told the commissioners. “We spend a lot of money updating studies.”
Dukes said the urbanized transit or fixed route system would be heavily concentrated in the city. Since both city and county would benefit, Dukes said the local matching cost of the study, $30,000, could be shared at $15,000 each.
Dukes said the Atlanta Regional Commission would conduct the study, but would need a letter of support from the city and county by Aug. 31 and have the funds available beginning July 2012. Because of that, Smith said the funding would come out of the next year’s budget.
Like the current system, there would be fare for users, Dukes said, but noted there are additional funding including advertising on and in the buses, should they go to a fixed route system.
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January 23, 2013 - Trust. Such a simple word but also one of great importance in relationships.
It is difficult to have a good relationship with someone you do not trust. It is also an important part of faith.
We trust God and He provides for us out of His goodness and the bounty of His blessings.
Proverbs 3:5-7 urges us to Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding 6In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths. 7Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
What if we were to put all our trust in the Lord? What difference might that make in our lives? How might we be guided in reaching out and sharing the blessings we have received with one another?
Yes, there may be days when we do not feel very blessed but, if you really think about it and view it from the lives of those in impoverished regions, we are blessed.
Think of the difference our reaching out, using the blessings God has given us, might make in the lives of others.
Think of how our taking time to care and show concern for them might build trust in us and, ultimately, in God!
When I think of trust I think of the relationship between Jesus and Peter. Peter was one of that inner-circle with Jesus, one of His closest friends.
He proclaimed Jesus the Christ, the Son of the Living God. In the next breath he was trying to prevent Jesus from going to Jerusalem and the death that awaited Him. Jesus rebuked Peter and how Satan was using him. Jesus also predicted Peter would deny Him three times before the cock crowed which Peter vehemently denied.
It was Peter who drew the sword to defend Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. It was Peter who entered the courtyard of the high priest. Trust was broken.
Think of how it feels when a trusted friend betrays your trust.
A promise is broken, a secret spilled, and you are deeply hurt.
You want to pull away and not have anything to do with this friend.
When that happens, when you decide to get revenge for their action, when you bear the grudge, who is it that is hurt the deepest?
You are. It tears down our body, our health suffers, the friendship is destroyed and our faith is sorely challenged.
What did Jesus do for Peter?
After Jesus rose from the grave He meets Peter and the disciples on the lake shore where they had been fishing.
Jesus says to Peter, three times, Do you love Me? Peter keeps responding that Jesus knows he does.
Three times Peter denied Jesus, three times Jesus restored him.
If your brother sins against you, go and seek to be reconciled (Matthew 18).
Our God has revealed Himself in His Son, may He reveal Himself to others through us.
The Rev. Kendall Schaeffer is pastor of St. Trinity Lutheran Church.
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The past twenty years have seen great theoretical and empirical advances in the field of corporate finance. Whereas once the subject addressed mainly the financing of corporations--equity, debt, and valuation--today it also embraces crucial issues of governance, liquidity, risk management, relationships between banks and corporations, and the macroeconomic impact of corporations. However, this progress has left in its wake a jumbled array of concepts and models that students are often hard put to make sense of.
Here, one of the world's leading economists offers a lucid, unified, and comprehensive introduction to modern corporate finance theory. Jean Tirole builds his landmark book around a single model, using an incentive or contract theory approach. Filling a major gap in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance is an indispensable resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as researchers of corporate finance, industrial organization, political economy, development, and macroeconomics.
Tirole conveys the organizing principles that structure the analysis of today's key management and public policy issues, such as the reform of corporate governance and auditing; the role of private equity, financial markets, and takeovers; the efficient determination of leverage, dividends, liquidity, and risk management; and the design of managerial incentive packages. He weaves empirical studies into the book's theoretical analysis. And he places the corporation in its broader environment, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, and examines the two-way interaction between the corporate environment and institutions.
Setting a new milestone in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance will be the authoritative text for years to come.
"A magnificent new book. . . . This is far more than the mere textbook it purports to be; it has a plausible claim to be the first truly comprehensive overview of corporate finance by an economist."--The Economist
"Impeccably systematized. . . . Tirole's book will have a prominent place in my library, and I am sure that I shall have plenty of occasions to refer to its authority in the future. It fully deserves a 'buy' rating."--Rudi Bogni, Times Higher Education Supplement
"Jean Tirole has provided the profession with its first comprehensive, advanced treatment of corporate finance theory. . . . [T]he overall result is far from idiosyncratic and it will have a major impact upon teaching and research in corporate finance."--David Webb, Economic Journal
"Using a single elementary model Tirole brings out with refreshing ease an unsuspected unity and simplicity in a field that might otherwise be perceived as dishearteningly fragmented and complex. This masterful book will be a formidable teaching tool at the graduate level and an essential reference for research in corporate finance."--Marco Pagano, Professor of Economics, University of Naples Federico II
"The field of corporate finance has developed rapidly and extensively in the last twenty years, but those who want to teach it face a barrier: the absence of a widely accepted textbook. Jean Tirole's book fills that gap. Applying his celebrated analytical and expositional skills, Tirole synthesizes and unifies the field in a clear and accessible manner, emphasizing particularly the connections between corporate finance and contract theory and the role of incentives and control in firms' financial decisions. The result is a book that will be an important resource for students and teachers alike."--Oliver Hart, Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics, Harvard University
This book has been translated into:
Other Princeton books authored or coauthored by Jean Tirole:
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Fair Trade your Supermarket
A good way to have an effect on the management of a grocery store or café is to send a letter to them personally. Be brief and precise. Give a clear definition of who you are, what you are asking, and the precise reason for your action. Tell the management how this action will benefit their company by keeping you as a customer. Attach information about Fair Trade and how they can get a hold of Fair Trade certified sources.
I am a customer of yours, concerned about the social and environmental impacts of my consumer choices. As I enjoy buying coffee here, I want to encourage you to carry Fair Trade Certified coffee with the TransFair independently monitored label. It is my intention to purchase it over other brands.
Many coffee farmers receive market payments for their coffee which are less than the costs of production, forcing them into a cycle of poverty and debt. Intensive coffee farming also leads to environmental problems, such as deforestation; the Smithsonian Institute has documented that the eradication of the natural environment of songbirds is contributing to their extinction. Industrial coffee farming also contributes to the contamination of air and water through pesticide poisoning.
Fair Trade works to correct these imbalances by guaranteeing a minimum wage for the small producers' harvest, as well as encouraging the cultivation of coffee without the use of pesticides. With the profits generated from receiving a fair wage, coffee growers are able to invest in such areas as health, education and environmental protection.
For these reasons, I and many other like-minded consumers are now choosing Fair Trade Certified coffee over other brands. Independent surveys show that 8 out of 10 consumers would rather purchase a product associated with a cause they believe in. There is currently a consumer demand campaign in our town asking coffee retailers such as yourself to make sure we can buy Fair Trade Certified coffee in your store.
The Fair Trade monitoring organization, TransFairUSA, is now certifying many coffee suppliers in the area and can help you to get Fair Trade coffee into your store. For information about where to find Fair Trade Certified coffees, contact Fair Trade USA, 1500 Broadway, Suite 400, Oakland, CA 94612, 510/663.5260, or www.fairtradeusa.org.
Offering Fair Trade coffee with the Fair Trade USA independent certification seal would benefit your business and coffee farmers around the world.
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Editor's note: A nationally syndicated columnist, Roland S. Martin is the author of "Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith" and "Speak, Brother! A Black Man's View of America." Visit his Web site for more information. For the next few months, he will be hosting "No Bias, No Bull" at 8 p.m. ET on CNN while Campbell Brown is on maternity leave.
Roland Martin says that a bigger cigarette tax is a good idea that will discourage an unhealthy practice.
(CNN) -- We all have our vices. But one that drives me nuts is smoking.
There is nothing -- NOTHING! -- that I like about smoking.
Why someone in their right mind would want to essentially inhale fire is beyond me.
When relatives come to my home and they smoke, they can't just stand outside the front or back door. No, I send them to the furthest point in the backyard to get their nicotine fix.
I celebrate when cities pass smoking bans because the only smoke I want in a restaurant should come from a hot, juicy steak. If I'm walking down the street, and the person in front of me is leaving their trail of smoke, I'll happily speed up to get past them or publicly wave the smoke out of the way when walking by them to show my disapproval. And it angers me to drive down the street and look over to the next car and see a mom or dad puffing away as a helpless child has to sit there and inhale that junk.
So don't think for a second that you'll find any sympathy from me for the folks who are up in arms over the federal tobacco tax on a pack of cigarettes jumping from 39 cents to a buck and a penny. The money will be used for the expansion of the president's health initiatives.
Look, I don't care if a Democrat, Republican, or independent was behind this tax, I would gladly see it happen.
The folks who are not happy are saying this is far too much taxation and it's wrong, but we can't deny the health reality. Cigarettes are unhealthy. Period. This isn't up for argument or debate.
According to an Associated Press story, "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says cigarette smoking results in an estimated 443,000 premature deaths each year, and costs the economy $193 billion in health care expenses and lost time from work. Smoking is a major contributor to heart disease, cancer and lung disease."
But then those who don't want to see it happen are bringing out the usual prop: the poor, poor people.
Critics say the tax will disproportionately hurt poor people. Fine! Did we somehow forget that poor people already are likely to be in poorer health because they are living in areas where there are food deserts, and that means lack of access to fresh fruits and vegetables?
Poor folks are likely to lack insurance, which means when they get sick, they will go to a city or county hospital, and taxpayers have to foot the bill. So their decision to buy cigarettes will probably hit us in the pocketbook later on.
Folks, poor people are always used by someone. And in this case, they are being trotted out so we can say, "Oh, this is so harsh because the poor will be hurt."
Let's face it: I don't want poor, middle or rich folks smoking. I just think it's disgusting. But if this tax will cause a lot of folks -- poor or otherwise -- to quit smoking and add a few years to their life, then I call that good legislation.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of Roland Martin.
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Most Outrageous Perks That Employers Offer In 2012
At a time when companies are struggling to recruit certain talent, established companies and startups alike know they have to dangle perks to lure recruits into the fold. And since free food and drink, stock options and yoga classes are no longer special, sometimes that means offering outrageous incentives.
In the '90s, I worked for a Silicon Valley startup that offered refrigerators stocked with food and drink, Ping-Pong tables, a weekly cruise, happy hours, dry cleaning service, Razor scooters for zipping around the building, casual dress, and flex-time schedules.
Today, that's barely the bottom-line offering for tech or financial sector employers. According to Forbes and CNN, many companies offer employees discounted or free massages and yoga, and perks like concierge service are no longer reserved for executives. Startups appear to have the most original perks, Mashable reports.
Sound too good to be true? You, too, could command these goodies if your skills are in demand:
- Timberland, the outdoor outfitter company, offers workers a $3,000 subsidy as a down payment on a hybrid automobile.
- Texas-based Container Store rewards employees for safe driving, giving out $5,000 for 10 years of flawless driving.
- San Francisco startup Qwiki allows commuting employees to expense train tickets. The company will buy you a bike or cover your gas expenses.
- If you work for S.C. Johnson, the company will change the oil in your car.
- Abercrombie & Fitch offers its employees electric scooters for buzzing around the corporate campus.
- Google offers employees breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks for free at any of the 16 gourmet cafes on its campus.
- Biotech giant Amgen Inc. cooks up health-conscious meals for employees' children dropped off at the company daycare. Employees also enjoy 16 paid holidays a year.
- Microsoft employees can eat in one of the 14 restaurants and pubs located in a company mall that's replete with stores and banks.
- Silicon Valley startup Asana provides workers with two organic home-cooked meals for vegetarians, vegans and meat-eaters.
Childbirth And Childcare
- American Century Investments offers coverage for employee adoption expenses and fertility treatments up to $10,000 per year.
- Amgen offers on-campus Lamaze and breastfeeding classes and lactation rooms for mothers.
- Google reimburses moms $500 for takeout meals during the first three months after the child is born.
- Eli Lilly allows pregnant workers to take a paid month off before the baby's due date.
- Deloitte allows workers to check up on their kids in daycare via webcams.
- Cliff Bar treats workers to a 40-foot bouldering wall, fitness center, dance studio, two massage rooms and a staff of certified trainers and nutritionists.
- Pixar Animation Studios employees run on indoors or outdoors paths, train in the gym or swim in the outdoor pool.
Assorted Great Perks
- S.C. Johnson gives retired employees lifetime memberships in its fitness center.
- Outfitter Patagonia grants two weeks of full-paid leave to employees who want to volunteer for any green non-profit organization.
- Steel processor Worthington Industries offers workers subsidized onsite haircuts for $4.
- Jam maker J.M. Smucker grants employees a 100 percent college tuition reimbursement, with no ceiling.
- Genentech sends ergonomics specialists to examine your work desk and gear to ensure you're comfortable.
Perks Especially For Carvers
Snowboarders rejoice! If all your company offers is 10 minutes to hustle down to the sandwich truck, you won't believe what Burton Original Snowboard Company of Vermont offers its workers:
- Free season ski pass
- Company skate park
- Company closures when it snows 2 feet or more (so workers may go boarding)
- Dog-friendly office
- Company rides and ski trips.
If you could have any of these perks, which one would you choose?
Woodrow Aames has written articles and profiles for Yahoo, Microsoft Network & Encarta, as well as tech savvy pieces for various computer schools. He holds an MFA degree and has taught English abroad.
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Looking for a job? Click here to get started.
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April 13, 2012 > Deaths barred in Italian village
Deaths barred in Italian village
Submitted By AP Wire Service
ROME (AP), Mar 13 - Since the start of the month it has been illegal to die in Falciano del Massico, a village of 3,700 people some 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Naples in southern Italy.
Mayor Giulio Cesare Fava issued the tongue-in-cheek decree because the village has no cemetery and it is feuding with a nearby town that has one - creating a logistical problem about what to do with the deceased.
The mayor told newspapers that villagers are content.
``The ordinance has brought happiness,'' he was quoted Tuesday as saying. ``Unfortunately, two elderly citizens disobeyed.''
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Rewarding research excellence
Two young scientists have received the first ever Excellent Paper in Neuroscience Award, an initiative of the ERA-NET NEURON project (Network for European Funding for Neuroscience Research). NEURON received EUR 2.7 million under the ERA-NET scheme of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6) to better coordinate national research funding programmes and funding activities in Europe in the field of disease-related neurosciences.
Dr Heidi Nousiainen from the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Finland and Dr Asya Rolls from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel were announced as winners at the Seventh Forum of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in July 2010.
The Excellent Paper in Neuroscience Award acknowledges outstanding scientific publications by young researchers in the field of disease-related neurosciences. Drs Nousiainen and Rolls were selected out of a 2009 nominations list of seven candidates.
NEURON coordinator Dr Marlies Dorlöchter, from Projektträger im Deutschen Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt in Germany, explained that the achievements of the winners characterises Europe's high standards in neuroscience research. Dr Dorlöchter added that both scientists have contributed significantly to knowledge of the disease and injury of the nervous system, and to the development of new therapies.
Dr Nousiainen won the award for the paper 'Mutations in mRNA export mediator GLE1 result in a fetal motoneuron disease', published in Nature Genetics in 2008. The paper identifies the gene (GLE1) underlying two fatal nervous system diseases (LCCS1 and LAAHD). The study contributes significant new information on the molecular background of fetal motoneuron disease, and on the essential mechanisms for the development, maturation and functioning of motoneurons.
Dr Rolls received the award for the paper 'Two Faces of Chondroitin Sulfate Proteoglycan in Spinal Cord Repair: A Role in Microglia/Macrophage Activation', published in PLoS (Public Library of Science) in 2008. The study addresses the issue of why the body invests so much energy in scar formation after traumatic spinal cord injury (SCI) only to inhibit spinal cord repair. Dr Rolls found that the CSPG protein performs a critical role in recovery, and that this role could provide new avenues in the treatment of SCI.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that more than 1 billion people suffer from disorders of the central nervous system. Along with the increase in life expectancy (thanks in no small part to modern science and medicine), there has been a considerable increase in the incidence of neurodegenerative conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease. These conditions impact the quality of life of sufferers, as well as their friends and family, and place significant financial pressures on society.
The NEURON ERA-NET is a collaboration between national research funding programmes and funding activities in the field of disease-related neurosciences in Europe (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Luxemburg, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK) as well as Canada and Israel. Since 2006, it has provided a structure in which members can coordinate their programmes and develop joint strategies for funding neuroscience research.
The ERA-NET scheme, first introduced as a highly innovative component of FP6 (2002-2006), continues to bolster its support to structuring the European Research Area and enhancing the scale of Europe's research efforts under FP7 (2007-2013).
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Teenaged Nazi Music Duo Prussian Blue Discover Marijuana, Have A Change Of Heart
Remember back in 2006 when a couple of little blond twins had a Nazi-themed, Holocaust-denying pop band named “Prussian Blue?” And the media exploded about how offensive it was that these kids’ parents were holding them up as some kind of white power Olsen Twins? (Which is silly because the Olsen Twins have already got that covered. I kid. I kid.) So, now that those girls are 19 and have a mind of their own, what do they have to say for themselves? A lot, as it turns out.
Aaron Gell, who profiled the girls in GQ back in ’06, caught up with them for their first interview in five years, and it is amazing. Lamb Gaede (pictured at left) works as a hotel chambermaid near the family, and Lynx Gaede (pictured at right) has a host of medical problems and lives with her mother, stepfather, and her half-sister named Dresden. (They say their biological father was “a druggie” when they were young.)
Lamb and Lynx aren’t “white nationalists” anymore. Lamb told Gell, “My sister and I are pretty liberal now.” And her sister added, “I love diversity.” They blame their earlier attitudes on being home-schooled and having “no idea what I was saying,” as Lamb puts it. The first hint that they didn’t care for the whole “being a racist idiot” lifestyle was when they started playing Bob Dylan’s song “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” at all their concerts in 2006, despite audiences booing because Dylan is Jewish and they were racist a–holes.
Speaking of a–holes, the girls’ mother, April, says she thinks the girls will eventually be more racist, stating, “When they have children of their own, they’ll come to the same conclusions I have.” You call those conclusions? Nice euphemism for just making sh*t up about millions of people. Meanwhile, Lynx says she doesn’t think they should have been pushed towards “being front-men for a belief system that we didn’t even completely understand at that time. We were little kids.”
You might be wondering when I was going to get to the part about marijuana. You may have even been skimming everything up to this point to get to the sticky icky talk. Fair enough. Lynx says, “Marijuana saved my life.” She was diagnosed with cancer during her freshman year of high school. After having a large tumor removed from her shoulder, she developed CVS (cyclic vomiting syndrome). Marijuana alleviated her symptoms better than anything else she had tried, and she became one of the first minors in Montana to get a medical marijuana card. Lamb also got a card for scoliosis, back pain, lack of appetite, and stress. Now they want to work to make medical marijuana legal nationwide. No offense, girls, but I think the movement would rather not be associated with the band, even if you have changed your minds.
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An AMP (Alternative Marine Power) application installed in the south of Sweden port by Cavotec for 'Cold Ironing'.
Cavotec claim this to be the largest high-voltage shore connection system in the world.
Concern over air quality in harbours has led to growing pressure on port operators to reduce carbon and nitrogen dioxide emissions. Alternative Maritime Power (AMP) is a cold ironing system which allows ships to turn off their engines when in port, and plug into shore-side electricity supply, thus helping to bring cleaner air to ports and surrounding communities.
Cavotec’s Alternative Maritime Power systems can be fitted on ships, or, space permitting, on quaysides. The company offer shore to ship power connections, as well as deck and barge-based units.
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Twitter users who want to know how many spammy or "fake" accounts are following them can check out a new service called Fake Follower Check.
Designed by a group named StatusPeople, the service looks at your Twitter account to scan a certain number of followers. In return, it tells how many of your followers are good, inactive, or fake. In my instance, it informed me that 77 percent of the accounts were good, 19 percent inactive, and 4 percent fake.
You can also get results for other Twitter accounts. Just plug in the name of the account, and the Fake Follower Check displays its percentages.
Based on my actual number of Twitter followers, I determined that around 175 accounts are considered fake. But short of scouring through all my Twitter followers, I obviously can't confirm if that number is accurate.
OK, so how do the people behind StatusPeople arrive at their results?
The group says it looks at a sample of your followers, up to 500 accounts, depending on how popular you are. It then determines which ones may be spam accounts based on certain criteria. Accounts that have few or no followers and few or no tweets are suspect. Spammers also tend to follow a huge number of other accounts.
How accurate is the Fake Follower Check? It's difficult to know without comparing its results against those of a comparable service. And I don't know of any comparable services.
StatusPeople claims that Twitter users with 10,000 or fewer followers will get a "very accurate insight" into how many inactive and fake followers they have.
Unfortunately, the service doesn't name names, at least not at this point. You may discover the percentage of phony followers, but you can't find out which specific accounts are phony.
StatusPeople says it's working to enhance the accuracy of the service and plans to offer a spam removal tool, which presumably would help you track down and remove any accounts that you discover are fake.
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Holocaust Survivors – Genetically Damaged
It seems that jews will never cease coming up with the most amazing, and unfounded ways to push their holocaust propaganda onto people. Like any liar caught red handed, the jew will never stop contemplating ways to convince even part of the audience that what they are trying to sell you is real, and they will likely succeed with a few morons here and there. However, when one goes producing the kind of bold egregious lies like I stumbled across today, it’s hard to imagine even the dumbest of the dumb accepting these fables.
Most people who understand the problem with jews, and how they got into power, realize that the holocaust scam is one of the biggest legs propping up their fabled victim status, as well as keeping the public from looking to closely at jews as the real source of evil and destruction on planet earth. Those who don’t know about it, need only look at the fake shrunken jew heads, soap made from jew fat, jew skin lampshades, and other ridiculous tripe often trotted out as proof of this fabled holocaust. Of course, one could also look at the numerous holocaust fakers that have been exposed over the years too, but that’s not what this particular article is about.
It turns out, that in order to keep the public convinced that jews are just some kind of poor victims, some kike scientists have come up with a whole new angle. One, dare I say, that hasn’t been tried before. Sure, we’ve heard that second generation holocaust survivors suffer from the pain their parents felt, but we’ve yet to actually see someone have the gall to tell us that science can prove it!
According to this article HERE that’s exactly what they are trying to do. Apparently some scientists took some rats (ok mice, but jews are certainly rats, so maybe it’s a good comparison) and subjected them to the trauma of being taken away from their parents at an early age, and then did some ridiculous gene studies to prove that the offspring of these mice were still feeling the effects of the trauma. What’s funny is, jews always claim not to be a race, yet here they are doing genetic studies to prove that jewish holohoax survivors are now genetically predisposed to traumatic stress disorders!
This article is the most pathetic, pouting, whiny, “woe is me” type of propaganda one could possibly imagine, but jews are known to be crybabies, so to some of us, it’s no surprise. Supposedly parents who lived through the DEATH CAMPS (imagine that) were “forever changed by the horrors they witnessed”, so we should feel sorry for them. At least, that is the actual premise of the article. Even if not spoken, this is certainly what is implied, and most definitely defines it’s true purpose.
The question is, how can one feel sorry for a bunch of rat faced jews who were never executed, cooked in ovens, gassed with diesel (impossible) or otherwise mistreated by their German captors? Why is it we should feel sorry for these jews, knowing that jews coldly murdered nearly 60 million people in Russia, starved nearly another 10 million in the Ukraine, and wiped out nearly 3 million Armenians? Why is it the mainstream media never mentions these mass murders, which actually took place, instead of shoving their fable of six million poor little suffering jews down the throats of the rest of the world?
As a result [of their parents living in work camps], a generation of children grew up in homes in which one, and sometimes both, parents were battling untold emotional demons at the same time they were going about the difficult business of trying to raise happy kids. No surprise, they weren’t always entirely successful.
Well, that’s odd. If their parents were suffering so bad that it affected the children, how were they ever able to face the world again? If this is the case, surely the civilians of Dresden who were firebombed by jews Roosevelt and Churchill in a real holocaust should be claiming the same thing! The survivors of people murdered in Stalin’s gulags by the jewish NKVD should also certainly be able to lay claim to the same thing, right? An interesting thing to note is that those who went into the jew run gulags, almost NEVER came out alive, so there aren’t many “survivors” of these real death camps, which is a stark contrast to Hilter’s Germany, where jews were kept safe in work camps, fashioning the implements of war that the Germans would use to fight off the jewish communists from the east.
Over the years, a large body of work has been devoted to studying PTSD symptoms in second-generation survivors and it has found signs of the condition in their behavior and even their blood – with higher levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, for example. The assumption – a perfectly reasonable one – was always that these symptoms were essentially learned. Grow up with parents afflicted by the mood swings, irritability, jumpiness and hypervigilance typical of PTSD and you’re likely to wind up stressed and high-strung yourself.
Better yet, grow up with jewish parents teaching you to play the role of a victim, so that your prey will actually feel sorry for you as you rape and pillage their countries, and keep producing bullshit stories like this one to stave off any uprising. That has the sound of a much more likely scenario than what this article is trying to convince us of. The only stress jews really face is trying to feign real human emotion, and keep everyone convinced that the perpetrators behind our ills are actually some kind of poor innocent victims, when they are not. What’s funny is, besides the jews posting reinforcing comments on articles like this one at Yahoo, nobody really buys this crap anymore.
Now, a new paper adds another dimension to the science, suggesting that it’s not just a second generation’s emotional profile that can be affected by a parent’s trauma, it may be their genes too. The study, just published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, was conducted by a team headed by neurobiologist Isabelle Mansuy of the University of Zurich. What she and her colleagues set out to explore went deeper than genetics in general, focusing instead on epigenetics – how genes change as a result of environmental factors in ways that can be passed onto the next generation.
What really happened is jews went looking for some way to scientifically establish a reason for second and third generation “holocaust survivors” to continue to reap reparations (click HERE for a recent article of poor helpless jews who “deserve more” money) from the REAL VICTIMS of World War II. The jews would like us convinced that the (false) trauma suffered by jews in work camps, changed the genes of their children, and their grand children, so thus there is not just (fake) psychological damage, but (also fake) physical damage. This study reminds me of the laughable saying “I’ll smack you so hard your kids will feel it”, but now, they’re actually trying to convince you this is real!
These mice, for the purposes of the study, were the equivalent of first generation of Holocaust survivors. The same mice then fathered young and, like most males of the species, had nothing to do with their upbringing. The pups were raised by their mothers with none of the trauma and separation their fathers had suffered, and yet when they grew up, not only did they exhibit the same anxious behavior, they also had the same signature gene changes.
I almost want to fall off my chair, and roll around on the floor holding my gut laughing at these statements, but this is no laughing matter (snicker). I mean, where does one start with such a ridiculously absurd and ludicrous story? Certainly mice are a good stand in for jewish rats, I’ll give them that much, but beyond that, there is nothing of value to discuss. Somehow, we are supposed to believe that even two generations removed from the stress of a (heaven forbid) work camp, that jews are anxious because someone they never knew worked to build parts for the German war machine? Oh wait, we’re supposed to be going on the premise that these work camps were horrible death camps, but I just can’t bring myself to speak of it that way.
Like I said, the jews are anxious that people will figure out what a bunch of lying sacks of shit they are, more than they are anxious because grandma got a free tattoo from the Germans. Speaking of tattoos, why would Germans tattoo jews, give them uniforms, delouse their cloths, and go to so much effort if they were just going to kill them? Maybe Hitler should have taken a lesson from Stalin and the ruthless jews of the NKVD, because they simply slaughtered the hell out of people, without all the fanfare and expense. Go watch the video I posted on this article HERE to see how jews go about executing people, and see if you can still buy into the gas chamber hoax.
The Holocaust is hardly the only life crisis that can shape behavior and genes. Survivors of Afghanistan, Iraq or Darfur – or even those who grew up in unstable or abusive homes – can exhibit similar changes. But Holocaust survivors remain one of the best study groups available because their trauma was so great, their population is so well known, and so many of them have gone on to produce children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren. Humans, alas, may never run out of ways to behave savagely toward one another. But the better we can understand the price paid by the victims – and the babies of the victims – the better we might be able to treat their wounds.
That’s right “THE HOLOCAUST”! They might as well capitalize every letter, because only THE JEW HOLOHOAX is allowed to be called a holocaust. If you want to get an understanding of what a holocaust is, and what it means, read this article HERE, because I can assure you, it is nothing close to what jews have depicted in their fables.
Others can exhibit changes similar to what “holocaust survivors” do, but as the quote above would have you believe, only jewish holohoax survivors can be considered a good study group, because their trauma was so horrible, so unimaginable, and so well known (because the jewish media pushes it daily), and so many of them have gone on to…wait a minute! Stop the presses!! How did so many of these victims of death camps go on to produce children, grand children, and great-grandchildren unless they weren’t really death camps at all?
Here is how you can better understand the price paid by the victims. Look around yourself today. Look at the millions of homeowners being thrown out on the streets. Look at the over one million Iraqis being slaughtered by American troops. Look at all of the fake jewish terrorists killing people with their terrorist activities. Look at your economy collapsing around you. Look at the filth being shoveled down your throats by jew owned Hollywood, and the jewish media. If you want to understand the price paid by the victims of World War II, look at Dresden, Nagasaki, and Hiroshima.
Look at yourselves, and all other humans around the world, because the communist jews won WWII, and WE HUMANS ARE THE VICTIMS of the jews and their depravity, murder, nation wrecking, usury, deceit, oppression, and genocide. It is YOUR BABIES that will continue to pay a heavier price as time goes by, and the only way to treat the wounds of the real victims is to rid yourself of the parasite doing the damage. Period.
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This May, same-sex marriage had a bit of a honeymoon. First, California’s Supreme Court struck down the state’s ban against such unions, becoming the second state high court, after that of Massachusetts, to do so. Thousands of California couples—from Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi to 85-year-olds who’d been living in non-legally recognized bliss for decades—rushed out for double-bride and double-groom cake toppers.
Then New York’s governor, David Paterson, decreed that all state agencies would follow a court ruling that ordered them to recognize out-of-state and international gay marriages performed in locations where they’re already legal, such as California, Canada, South Africa and Massachusetts. But should advocates of HIV prevention join gay-rights advocates in throwing rice?
The link between stereotypical, demonizing notions of gay sexual compulsivity, particularly gay male sexual compulsivity, and HIV transmission has long been noted and debated. It is a stereotype that gay advocates have often rebutted by arguing that marriage would ordain and encourage pure, old-fashioned fidelity, giving gay people a legally sanctioned reason to swear off the temptation of extracurricular, unprotected sex.
A Boston College study found that the opportunity to marry encourages gay couples to view their relationships as more “real,” increasing their commitment and the desire for a long-term mate. Yet this defense of marriage, which presumes that it could solve the “problem” of gay promiscuity, may reinforce the very stigma it means to combat.
It seems to us, the real debate over the link between gay marriage and the presumed lower risk of HIV transmission is this: If, as the no condoms/abstinence-only conventional wisdom seems to espouse, marriage is some kind of institutional prophylactic, then why deny same-sex couples the right to enter into it, when homosexual men have a higher HIV risk than heterosexuals?
And what, moreover, actually happens in terms of that HIV risk when same-sex partners do get the right to marry? (Not to mention that heterosexual marriage, especially in the developing world, has been shown to increase HIV transmission risk, due to infidelity and the fact that married couples often do not use condoms.)
Why can’t the playing field, so to speak, be leveled regardless of orientation and risk?
Some gay-marriage advocates and opponents have contended that the recognition has more to do with winning legal benefits—such as health insurance and advancement from “second class citizen” status—than with restructuring the emotional terrain of commitment and “acceptable” sexual behavior and risk.
Yet it is the low self-esteem that springs from inequality that can spur people toward behaviors—sexual and otherwise—that can compromise their health and well-being. “[Banning gay marriage] is not an attempt to put others down,” says William J. Bennett on the Catholic Education Resource Center website. “It is simply an acknowledgement and celebration of our most precious social act.” Hmm, so gays would suck the preciousness out of it, huh?
Gay or straight, the key to not spreading HIV in any relationship is honesty and communication about sexual behavior and risk.
Studies in the locations where same-sex civil unions and marriages are legal hint that predefined gender norms and expectations in straight couples can disrupt a household. They report that same-sex couples are often more egalitarian than their straight counterparts—with work split more equally and the notion of a dominant partner de-emphasized. The studies indicate same-sex married partners are more likely to use humor and affection to keep arguments from exploding, whether discussing HIV or extramarital interests.
While it’s too early to tell exactly what, if anything, gay marriage will mean for HIV rates, all signs point to a positive effect.
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by Bernie Niemeier
When Forbes.com first named Virginia the “Best State for Business” in 2006, the accolade was great news for the commonwealth. Virginia’s many advantages — northernmost right-to-work state, low corporate taxes and business-friendly culture — gained significant global exposure.
Virginia now has held its perch at the top of the list for four years in a row. The obvious questions are: How long can this last? Will Virginia be No. 1 again when the next list comes out this fall?
A close look at Forbes.com’s quantitative methodology in ranking the states offers some clues. The system is based on 33 data points for each state, which are combined into six broad categories: business costs, labor, regulatory environment, economic climate, growth prospects and quality of life. Rankings in these six categories are then combined to determine the order of the final list.
Last year, Virginia ranked first, second or third in three of the six categories: No. 1 in quality of life, No. 2 for regulatory environment and No. 3 for labor. On the remaining measurements, Virginia still ranked among the top 20 states: 12th for growth prospects, 18th for economic climate and 20th for labor cost.
Virginia’s closest competitors include:
No. 2 Washington, which outranks us on growth prospects, economic climate and labor;
No. 3 Utah, which bests Virginia on economic climate and business costs;
No. 4 Colorado, which is ahead of us on labor and economic growth; and
No. 5 North Carolina, which surpasses Virginia on business costs and economic climate.
Interestingly, the Southeast for decades has been the nation’s hot spot for job growth and economic development, yet North Carolina is the only state besides Virginia from the region ranked in the top 10.
If Virginia should slip from its throne, what state would take its place? Possibly Washington, its closest rival last year.
Washington holds its biggest advantage over Virginia in the area of economic climate. That category (where Washington ranked third and Virginia was 18th last year) includes projected growth in jobs, income and gross state product, as well as venture capital investments and business openings/closings.
On the other hand, Virginia holds a big edge over Washington in the quality of life category, which includes schools, health, crime, cost of living and poverty rates. While Virginia outranks all other states on this measurement, Washington is in the middle of the pack at No. 24.
Luckily, the numbers-oriented methodology used by Forbes.com doesn’t measure things like traffic congestion, inadequate highway funding or state budget cuts. Maybe those problems are so widespread they wouldn’t make a difference in the rankings.
Virginia can’t keep its top rank forever, but its advantages as a good place for business should keep it among the nation’s leading states for years to come.
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After 30 years of smoking, Paducah resident Frank Schuler knew he wanted to quit. He just didn’t know how.
Schuler wasn’t facing any major health issues, but he was certain his life would be better if he stopped smoking. “I’m not stupid,” Schuler said. “I knew smoking would catch up with me.”
Schuler tried a variety of methods, such as quitting cold turkey and having friends hold his cigarettes for him. He even visited a hypnotist. “The hypnotist implanted the suggestion that if we lit up another cigarette, it would taste like burnt rubber,” Schuler said. “Six hours later, I tried it to see if it was true. It wasn’t.”
Schuler finally stumbled across an advertisement for a 13-week course in smoking cessation at a Paducah hospital. The classes taught the Cooper-Clayton method, a combination of nicotine replacement and behavioral therapy developed by former smoker Thomas Cooper and addiction specialist Richard Clayton, who were faculty members at the University of Kentucky.
Schuler showed the ad to a co-worker and fellow smoker. “I said, ‘Gosh, instead of trying to figure out how to do this on our own, why don’t we enroll in this program and see if we can learn the right way?’”
The Cooper-Clayton method consists of free, hour-long sessions held once a week at local hospitals. In the introductory session, participants are asked to continue smoking as usual over the course of the next week, in order to tally how many cigarettes they smoke and when.
In the next session, the program’s facilitators work with the group to determine what triggers an individual’s urge to use tobacco, said Jamie Smith, a cancer control specialist with the Kentucky Cancer Program.
“We have them make a list. If you are craving a cigarette, what can you do to get your mind off it?” Smith said.
“People may associate getting up in the morning with having a cup of coffee and a cigarette. We try to eliminate both, and suggest maybe sitting down and having a glass of orange juice instead,” Smith said.
Participants also choose a nicotine replacement method, such as lozenges, gum or patches, which they must purchase themselves.
“The patch is probably the best because it’s dummy-proof,” Smith said. “With the gum and the lozenges, you have to worry about pH balances in the mouth. You can put (the patch) on first thing in the morning and not have to worry about anything else during the day.”
The next weeks help aspiring nonsmokers learn to break their addiction. Participants spend a few minutes of every session watching a video that discusses an aspect of smoking cessation, from depression and withdrawal symptoms to diet and exercise habits. After the video, group members talk to facilitators and each other about the difficulties and successes they encounter.
Although there is no easy way to quit smoking — “I slapped on the first patch on Friday morning and went through sheer hell that weekend,” Schuler said — the method works better than many others.
Compared to other methods, Cooper-Clayton offers the highest long-term sustainability rate, at 47 percent. “Other support groups without behavioral modification are at about 20 percent sustainability, so you have a greater chance of staying a nonsmoker by doing the Cooper-Clayton method,” Smith said.
Smith added that the method is so successful because it teaches smokers to cope with everyday stress, rather than isolating them, as rehabilitation for other addictions would.
“With the Cooper-Clayton method, you’re equipped with the information to stay in your same environment and go through your daily life. That makes it easier to transition out of the class into life without cigarettes,” Smith said.
Although the system strongly recommends that participants quit on the first day of their work week, Schuler made it through the weekend and successfully completed the Cooper-Clayton course. Schuler hasn’t had a cigarette since he finished the program nearly 13 years ago.
“I don’t think about it much anymore, maybe once in a blue moon. But there are no more overpowering urges,” Schuler said. Since he became a non-smoker, Schuler has taken up running and has even completed a half marathon.
Schuler also spent a few years working as a facilitator for newcomers to the Cooper-Clayton classes, providing the kind of support that might be lacking for those who try to quit on their own. This is especially needed in Kentucky, where 25.2 percent of the population uses tobacco, according to the Center for Disease Control.
“It was my observation that people who never smoked, when you tell them that you’ve quit smoking after a week or 10 days, they’re like, ‘Well that’s over with. Let’s get on with life,’” Schuler said. “It betrays that they don’t know what it’s like. But going into the program, you’re dealing with people in the same boat that you are.”
The next session of smoking cessation classes will be taught at Western Baptist Hospital on Aug. 24 at 5:30 p.m. To register, call 442-1310.
Call Laurel Black, a Paducah Sun staff writer, at 270-575-8668.
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This is a list of external media we have compiled that show first-hand experiences with child soldiers and other gruesome occurrences. Our hope is that by viewing these videos and pictures, you can learn the true barbarity of the world of child soldiers.
- Invisible Children - Invisible Children is a very powerful documentary made by young Americans who travel to Uganda. This film documents the true tragedies of young soldiers and how a 20 year war has devastated the entire country. Watching Invisible Children is truly a well presented experience that anyone can be interested in and that everyone should watch. A version of the film provided by the creators is available for free on Google Video. We highly recommend this film and encourage everyone to see it.
- A Duty to Protect is a short documentary highlighting the child soldier situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is a very powerful documentary that will surely move anyone who watches it. Included are real footage of villages with child soldiers, interviews with former child soldiers, and even footage of current child soldiers in action.
- "Children of War" - This is an eyewitness slide show with audio from CNN that shows how children in Iraq are dealing with the war in their country. (full story)
- "Child Soldiers in Africa" - This is another eyewitness slide show with audio from CNN that serves as a great overview of the child soldier situation in the world as well as being a presentation of great impact on the viewer.
- Jon Stewart's Interview with Ishmael Beah - On February 14, 2007, Ishmael Beah, author of A Long Way Gone, appeared on The Daily Show discussing his memoir and his past as a child soldier in Sierra Leone.
- A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah - A Long Way Gone is Ishmael Beah's personal story about being a child soldier. Beah has been in the news frequently in recent months and it is this book that is generating much-needed media attention to the topic of child soldiers.
- Young Soldiers: Why They Choose to Fight by Rachel Brett and Irma Specht - Young Soldiers is about why children and young people choose to fight and leave their normal life behind. Included in the book are interviews of children and stories of being a soldier.
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November 9, 2012
Stone works in Wisconsin on Russian Revolution project
David Stone, Pickett professor of military history, spent July at the University of Wisconsin at Madison as part of an international team assembling a major project to commemorate the centenary of Russia's experience in World War I, the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War.
"For the Russian Empire, the outbreak of the first World War in 1914 began seven years of social and political upheaval," Stone said. "The goal of this project is to gather and assess the state of our knowledge on those momentous events."
The editorial team of the Russia’s Great War and Revolution project includes 30 scholars from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Russia and Japan, coordinating the efforts of hundreds of historians. The final product will be at least a dozen published volumes covering all aspects of Russian history during World War I and the Russian Revolution. Publication will begin in 2014 for the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I and continue for the next several years.
Stone’s responsibility is editing the volume covering the military history of the Russian Civil War, the conflict for control of Russia between the Reds — Vladimir’s Lenin’s communist Bolshevik party — and the Whites — a broad coalition of anti-communist forces.
“Though much less is known about it,” Stone said. “The Civil War lasted as long as World War I and killed far more Russians. It had an enormous effect on the subsequent development of the Soviet Union. Our goal in this volume is to pull together a range of research on the Civil War and how it was fought.”
Stone said that one of the best parts of the experience in Madison was the cooperation and camaraderie.
“All the people involved, from the most junior to the most senior professors, were truly committed to putting together the best project possible," he said. "You don’t get a lot of credit in the scholarly profession for editorial work, but people put in long hours for the sake of bringing this research to a broader public.”
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EDITORIAL: Ferries model could change
The review of the Coastal Ferry Act this week reminds us the Island has had an ever-evolving relationship with our transportation service to the mainland.
While many of B.C. Ferry Commissioner Gord Macatee’s recommendations make sense for the short term, it’s also clear that it is time for a new vision.
In case you missed it, Macatee’s report said B.C. Ferries can’t continue down the path it’s on. With a massive debt looming on the near horizon, the company can’t afford to simply raise rates and potentially discourage more people from using the systems.
Ridership is already down as fares have jumped dramatically in the last decade and Macatee says increases will continue. With capital costs bearing down, the only options are to increase the cost to users, get the government to fork over an even higher subsidy, or cut service.
But that’s assuming B.C. Ferries keeps its current model.
Perhaps a better solution is to rethink what we want from our ferry service. Islanders make up a quarter of the province’s population and we are the main users of the ferry service.
Before the government established B.C. Ferries in 1960, passengers and freight were transported by various private concerns. In many ways, it was the age of the automobile that made the mini-ocean-liners and freighters previously employed obsolete.
Transporting people and their vehicles will still be the primary role for a ferry service, but there are options.
Many people who regularly travel to the mainland would choose a bare bones voyage if it meant paying less. Others have no problem coughing up more for higher service levels. There are also other options for travel.
Macatee’s review has started the ball rolling. It’s time to take that momentum and rethink the future of B.C. Ferries.
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Marine Corps Pfc. Cameron C. Nunes, son of Kathleen Chilton of San Diego, Calif., and Joseph Nunes, of Warwick, recently completed 12 weeks of basic training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, S.C., which is designed to challenge new Marine recruits both physically and mentally.
Nunes and fellow recruits began their training at 5 a.m., by running three miles and performing calisthenics. In addition to the physical conditioning program, Nunes spent numerous hours in classroom and field assignments, which included learning first aid, uniform regulations, combat water survival, marksmanship, hand-to-hand combat and assorted weapons training. They performed close order drill and operated as a small infantry unit during field training.
Nunes and other recruits also received instruction on the Marine Corps' core values – honor, courage and commitment, and what the core values mean in guiding personal and professional conduct.
Nunes and fellow recruits ended the training phase with The Crucible, a 54-hour team evolution culminating in an emotional ceremony in which recruits are presented the Marine Corps Emblem, and addressed as "Marines" for the first time in their careers.
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[an error occurred while processing this directive]
Creation Story (Roatan Honduras)
…And on that day God made fish and other sea creatures. He had fun. He added stripes and large fins. To some he gave electricity and to others spines. Splashes of color appeared in the dark blue sea. God watched his creatures swim back and forth and said, “It is Good!” and it was good. But something was missing. The creatures needed something to live in, to swim around, places to hide and to eat and to raise their young. They were so magnificent it was not right to give them plain sand houses. So God set aside some time and many colors and crouched over those seas and got to work. Bit by bit the maker of the sun built up brightly colored caves and castles for the fish to live in and big purple fans for them to hide behind. Convoluted passages became places to swim and some creations were just for beauty and fun. When God was done he considered his Coral Reef. He waved his hand and said, “Grow” and they did and it was Good.
Then God went on to create other creatures like dogs and elephants and people. Those creatures were given parts of the coral reef in the design of their blood vessel throughout the body and on the surface of their brains. Little reminders. God is busier now. There are so many people to keep an eye on and to guide. He has a perfect grip on the world of course, but it takes too much time to set out on new art projects. He does paint twice a day. At sunrise and sunset he puts aside some time to make the sky beautiful. You can see him in the cloud colors and in rainbows. Every person you know or animal you see is covered with his finger prints. Every face, every gem, is a marvelous piece of art.
But if you want to see a masterpiece, here is what you need to do. Put on fins and a face mask and make yourself a very silly imitation of a fish. Swim out through waters older than you will ever be. Stare at that ancient reef…and be amazed!
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“In time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” George Orwell
In the world we live nowadays, there is a very pertinent question: What’s right and what’s wrong? Is there any room for ‘gray’ in between? Can anyone be a “moderate” extremist par opposition to an “extremist...?”
As such, here a good question: Is it enough to belong to a religion, be it Christianity, Judaism, a Buddhism, a Hinduism, or any other religion such as Baha’i or any other one for that matter... to be a righteous human being? No.
Kindly note that we do not include in the latter category the term “Muslim”, the reason being that Islam -unlike all above mentioned religions- is the only one to promote world domination accompanied by the mandatory killing of whoever does not submit to Islam, plus other atrocities. So, therefore Islam is not mentionedl, because it belongs on the very exclusive list of religiously presented ideology and could be a better fit under the list -of one- theocratic tyrannies.
For decades now, populations in the West have been submitted to the terror and horror coming our way courtesy of Islam, via its Muslim allegiance (given current circumstances, it’s impossible to include the Muslim world in the category of “civilization”.)
Like a snake, during decades Muslims have been migrating to our countries in a silent way, sneakily intruding inside our small, lost, forlorn towns and suburbs, whether in America or in Europe and even in Australia.
We must admit that, partly, they have been counting on inside help, that has facilitated them to do it silently so their secret has been very well kept by our governments, our think-tanks, our legal system, our media, even our military, all of them have been accomplices.
It seemed no one was too willing to pay attention at what Prophet Mohammed has demanded from his followers in the Koran, namely, the basic principle of sharia legitimizing Islamic fundamentalism, which in turn authorizes and promotes jihad (waging a holy war in the name of Islam,) as well as abuse of women, cruelty, sadism, pedophilia, stoning, beheading, mutilation, honor killing... and the list is endless -but it’s crowned by the leading terror of terror: Terrorism.
Terrorism, the brainchild of Islamist fundamentalism is a cowardice maximum, perpetrated against innocent, unassuming populations from our Western Civilization in times of peace.
For anyone who may be wondering, the terrorism that may or may not be inflicted by Muslims to Muslims among Muslims, should not be our concern, as they and everyone is free to do as they will in their countries. That’s the new, no matter how untold, approach that should be taken by the American people as a result of so many wars where our men have been taken to risk their lives -only to be betrayed by their government and people, as we are increasingly seeing it happening.
Along came the Muslim 1993 attack on the World Trade Center and with much ado in between, the worst, however, came on 9/11 when, on a sunny Tuesday, September 11, 2001, a series of coordinated suicide attacks were committed by Muslim terrorists, shouting Allah Hu Aqbar as they hit planes filled with innocent passengers against the Twin Towers in New York City and in Washington, D.C., wreaking havoc and causing over 3,000 victims and leaving many families mutilated from their loved ones.
And, Muslim terrorist attacks have continued to be committed, incessantly and throughout the world.
The last known feat committed in the name of the so-called “religion of peace” has been last Monday.
A two-legged sub-human went into a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, and shot point blank at a little 8-year old girl, then he shot and killed two more small children and their father.
We have often witnessed how civilian, “moderate” Muslims around the world, have reacted at similar news and rejoiced at the sight of the horrors caused by their Muslim terrorists.
We have seen scenes showing how sadistically “normal”, “moderate” Muslims have rejoiced at the beheading and 16-time stabbing of a 3-month old baby and the killing of innocents.
We can surely visualize how Muslims at large could never even imagine how a young mother may feel... when she had had her young husband and their three and six year old children slaughtered, basically torn from her life in a matter of seconds...
How could they even begin to understand that, when they don’t give it a second thought to train their own children to wrap themselves in bombs around their little bodies that will detonate in the middle of innocent people, again, wreaking havoc...
Animals kill each other or other species, but they do it only to eat and survive, or if they fight for power and authority it happens on a one-on-one situation. Among human beings the situation is different. We are supposed to aim at being better. But, not in the Muslim world.
It’s important to note that it was only in the seventh and eighth century that the new religion of Islam actually emerged with its founder and its holy book, the Koran -but, although Islam was not that well-known, in Northern Europe, however, they were aware of the existence of the saracens (kindly click on that link, as it will enlighten you on part of the history of that term) -term that preceded the word “Muslim” by the eleventh century.
As such, Northern Europeans seemed to have admitted Muslims’ predecessors, the saracens, among them and had accepted without much concern, the fact that they were descendants of Hagar and her son, Ishmael. Hagar was the slave of Abraham and Sarah, by whom Abraham had his son, Ishmael -but who he had to expel from their midst, when Sarah gave birth to their legitimate son and heir, Isaac.
An enlightening point for the general, American, reader is to historically show how parts of Spain were conquered by Muslims already by 711. History tells us that roughly two centuries later, Spanish Christians became deeply immersed in Arabic culture, and became so assimilated that they had no qualm to master Islamic theology and theologians as well as their philosophy and philosophers. Spanish Christians even ended up writing more beautiful, aesthetic poems in Arabic than the actual Arabic speaking Muslim invaders.
As a reaction to the Christian laxism, not unlike what one can witness in present day America and Europe, some tried to raise awareness among the Christian communities, in an effort to take them away from their spiritual negligence and carelessness... alas, only to see their praiseworthy efforts fail, and many died martyrs.
That sounds so far, partly familiar...
Up until now, we have been shocked to see blood, any blood overflow wildly.
But, change is slowly coming to our mentality. Now, we are reviewing such ‘broad’ concepts which are more self-inflicting, self-limiting and self-defeating, because in reality, what is “humane” is to love your friend and hate your enemy.
Yes, many in the West have been brought up believing that putting the other cheek could appease an enemy that wants to kill us -when in reality it was a sign of weakness, that more than anything else, has incited the enemy to finish the job.
Democracy has been our Trojan Horse that clever Muslims have been and still want to use to their advantage.
However, the real problem is that by Western standards, our societies are accepting the notion that there may be two kinds of Muslims.
Sure, such a classification in “moderate” Muslims existed in direct opposition to “radical Muslim terrorism,” would be an increasing plus for the livelihood of so many.
Ranking first among the beneficiaries of such scam are: business moguls at large, chief among them: Murdoch, Bloomberg, who are both sharing interest and investments going and coming in both directions, with Prince Alwaleed of Saudi Arabia, major investor in Western outfits, close friend of the Muslim Brotherhood and funder of many “chairs” promoting Islam, in Georgetown University, Harvard University and, to mention only one abroad, Oxford... But the list of business moguls benefiting of this accommodating situation vis-à-vis the misleading classification of “moderate” and “radical Muslim terrorists,” is much longer, touching people such as Bill Gates, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and so on.
Second in line, comes the vast majority of think-tanks, which to the best of my knowledge, may exist in the tens or maybe even hundreds of thousands, devoted to study Muslim terrorism. It is shocking for instance to read how some of those bookworms flatly announce that “Saudi Arabia is not a friend or a foe. It’s rather a rival.” Right. It’s not Saudi Arabian money that funded Osama Bin Laden who in turn gave birth to his brainchild, Al Qaeda. And there were not fifteen Saudi terrorists among the nineteen who perpetrated the massive attacks of 9/11. On moral ground, labelling Saudi a rival, is giving them moral equivalence with us... and willingly forgetting that stoning, sharia, beheading, honor killing and terrorism do not make Saudi our equal. Sure they could find an adequate Saudi donor for their outfits, but that is not certainly a way to watch over “American interests.”
Think-tanks owe a huge moral debt to Americans. They knew perfectly well how Islam was advancing in America and chose not to share that information freely with the large population -probably with the goal to keep it privy for their major donors so they continue funding their organizations.
Recently, however, with the American economy disturbing everybody’s plans, think-tanks may be suffering just as all other entities. In comes the magic word for all in times of need or despair: “HOPE”. And, hope comes to their rescue in the shape of the so-long awaited for, the so-long dreamed of, the so-called “moderate Muslims.” As if they could differentiate one from another within the Muslim world, forgetting that it’s like trying to differentiate water from vodka without tasting them.
On the other hand, what is left of truly American conservatives know that the new dwindling “marriage” concept has made it legal for men to marry men in many states, and women to marry women. Some great news for “to whom it may concern”: Appears that, just in time for elections, it is being planned to go-gay from coast to coast in the truly foreseeable future. That’s America now.
So, under those circumstances, how is America going to understand the vision of a united family nucleus in the Muslim world, where the patriarch rules and has the law on his side for all kind of horrors and punishment of women, abuse of children, and so much more.
However, in an inexplicable dichotomy, women as matriarchs, keep the family and home together. Families live close by, there is the matriarch’s home, where regularly the whole family, in-law, grandchildren and friends reunite for meals, celebrations, and more.
But, whatever they do, they will remain united. Their hate for the West, America, Europe and Israel is beyond any rational thinking.
If you are a Muslim reading these lines, and you think you are a true “moderate”, here is a solution for you: Gather all those like-minded Muslims around you and figure out how to start a revolution that disavows terrorism and all kind of barbarism that Islam expects from you. You will risk your life? Yes. Absolutely. So have all our people who at one time or another saw injustice and organized revolutions in the Western world. Trying it convincingly, may help us broaden our views of “moderates” in your world. Nothing else will do.
And, it’s up to Americans to choose the road to follow in our own country, we all either begin rallying -but not only for one point on the agenda or we will be defeated without a fight. Fighting for religious freedom is great. But our fight has to be to stop tyranny once and for all.
And, what to do with all those Muslims already in our midst. Number one: demand that immigration be slowed down and delayed, and above all, not to facilitate Saudi immigration of an average of roughly one hundred thousand (100,000) students per year, for example.
Americans need to make more American children, and subventions must be provided to help the young families. That’s not a question. It’s a right!
Then, let’s be alert and stop them from establishing sharia, however dissimulated in our midst. We must do that with the strength that Justice gives us,
The road is arduous. The prize is America, the former superpower.
Where will America end? At the hand of the Muslims or at the rightful hand of Americans?
May G-d bless and protect America.
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Lean Tools: Queuing Theory
Our model of tasks passing through a value stream to be completed (for example: coded, tested and deployed) is interestingly similar to a more general one that we use when studying the performance of a server application: the system model of queuing theory.
In the case of the server, user requests (HTTP requests or just RPC calls) must be served in sequence, minimizing the total response time between the moment when you click a link and the time when a page has been completely generated and then loaded on your side.
Translating this model to a development team means each phase is carried out by a subset of the people in the team, that we can call a station with a work space-based metaphor. Each subset may work only on a task at a time - either by time sharing or by finishing each task before accepting the other - or multiple developers may work in parallel.
In either case, the work items which are currently not accepted are put in the station's queue.
Concepts and metrics
The most important measure in queuing theory is the cycle time we have just defined: the time spent from the creation of a task or a user story to its completion and release. This time consists of the sum of the queue time (spent waiting) and the service time (spent adding value by working on it: talking with the client, writing tests and code, deploying the feature).
Given some hypotheses on the distribution of service times and rate of arrivals, which are random variables and not fixed quantities, we could derive some of these quantities from the others and find out which station needs help. We usually can't define such a precise, quantitative model for people-based systems as we are impredictable humans - nevertheless it is important to qualitatively know queuing theory concepts and measure them when we have the occasion.
Rate of arrival and rate of service
The rate of arrival is the amount of work entering the system in the unit of time - for example, the number of stories you accept for an iteration. This rate should be even out as much as possible if you want to minimize the cycle time.
In the opposite case, we would accept a 200-page requirements document for the months that follow. We may be able to work on the first requirements quickly, but most of them is going to be put into the queue and the average cycle time will increase. If we accept a lot of work, many items will just sit there waiting for the team to be available until they become obsolete or late to the market.
The throughput of a station is instead closely related to its service time, the average time spent working on an item fetched from the local queue. Service time complements queue time.
Utilization is defined as the percentage of time that a station spends working, with respect to the total time comprehending also waiting times and disposable work.
Any time the rate of arrival varies randomly instead of being perfectly fixed, a station's queue size increases with its utilization. As a metaphor, think of a traffic jam: the utilization of a road increases and as a result a long queue forms, even all the cars contained could go through the road faster if they had a constant speed.
Intuitively, this is what happens. Suppose we are at 90% average utilization and work arrives randomly from the previous station.
- sometimes we have nothing to do because the work items are taking a long time to be processed at the previous station. This time is lost and not recoverable: in these periods we are at (let's say) 70% utilization.
- At other times instead, many items arrive together after having been quickly processed at the previous station. We would have to work at 110% to drain the queue, but this is not possible.
You know that guy which knows everything about the codebase of your project, and everyone asks question to and pair program with? When you have a question, how long do you have to wait to reach him?
The bottleneck of a system is the station with the lowest throughput (let's not talk about demands and visits in this simplified model). As Goldratt says, you can easily find a bottleneck by looking at there the longest queue is: since the other stations complete their work at an higher rate by definition, they push their completed items to that station which is unable to process it with the same speed.
The bottleneck is the most important station as it dictates an upper limit for the throughput of the entire system: if deployment is your bottleneck, you can't complete stories faster than you can make releases (hard truth). If it's development because it is difficult to find clean coders, the features produced won't vary no matter how many requirements documents are written (another hard truth).
Continuing with the traffic metaphor: the bottleneck is that roundabout where 4 roads connect, or that tract you have passed through yesterday where two of the three lanes were closed and everyone was struggling to get into the remaining one.
Usually, when stuck in traffic many people reduce their speed as it's a waste of gas to accelerate much for the few meters you can cover when the jam moves. Cars cna only pass through the bottleneck at its own rate, so everyone feels free to reduce speed while being in line as the opposite would only produce a longer queue.
Here are some heuristics which are valid while simple mathematical assumptions are made on the distribution of the arrivals and the service time. We always talk of average quantities in this list, as in the rest of the article.
- Little's law tells us that measuring queue length is equivalent to measuring cycle time as they are proportional in a stable system.
- Variability in rate of arrival or in service time increase the cycle time and the queue.
- Large batches make queues grow.
- High utilization makes cycle time grow.
- To improve cycle times and reduce queues, target an even, stable rate of arrival, like restaurant and discos do by introducing discounts on certain times of the day. Other ways to help are smaller batches, stable service times, and parallelism where applicable (a station composed of two substations halves the service time.)
- Decreasing variability early in the process is better than later, like in Goldratt's matchstick game. As a consequence, you're better off when your bottleneck it's high in the stream: variability is reduced as the station dictates the rate to the rest of the system.
- A system where every station is working all the time is close to bankruptcy (also Goldratt's maxim), considering this case an extensions of high utilizations on all stations. If everyone is already working all the time, it has then no time to recover when its queue grows due to upstream variability.
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Front Page Titles (by Subject) OF GIVING THE LIE - Essays of Montaigne, vol. 6
The Online Library of Liberty
A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.
OF GIVING THE LIE - Michel de Montaigne, Essays of Montaigne, vol. 6
Essays of Montaigne, vol. 6, trans. Charles Cotton, revised by William Carew Hazlett (New York: Edwin C. Hill, 1910).
Part of: Essays of Montaigne, in 10 vols.
About Liberty Fund:
Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.
The text is in the public domain.
Fair use statement:
This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.
OF GIVING THE LIE
WELL, BUT some one will say to me, this design of making a man’s self the subject of his writing, were indeed excusable in rare and famous men, who by their reputation had given others a curiosity to be fully informed of them. It is most true, I confess and know very well, that a mechanic will scarce lift his eyes from his work to look at an ordinary man, whereas a man will forsake his business and his shop to stare at an eminent person when he comes into a town. It misbecomes any other to give his own character, but him who has qualities worthy of imitation, and whose life and opinions may serve for example: Caesar and Xenophon had a just and solid foundation whereon to found their narrations, in the greatness of their own performances; and it were to be wished that we had the journals of Alexander the Great, the commentaries that Augustus, Cato, Sylla, Brutus, and others left of their actions; of such persons men love and contemplate the very statues even in copper and marble.
This remonstrance is very true; but it very little concerns me:—
“I repeat my poems only to my friends, and when bound to do so; not before every one and everywhere; there are plenty of reciters in the open market-place and at the baths.”
I do not here form a statue to erect in the great square of a city, in a church, or any public place:—
“I study not to make my pages swell with empty trifles; you and I are talking in private:”
’tis for some corner of a library, or to entertain a neighbor, a kinsman, a friend, who has a mind to renew his acquaintance and familiarity with me in this image of myself. Others have been encouraged to speak of themselves, because they found the subject worthy and rich; I, on the contrary, am the bolder, by reason the subject is so poor and sterile that I cannot be suspected of ostentation. I judge freely of the actions of others; I give little of my own to judge of, because they are nothing: I do not find so much good in myself, that I cannot tell it without blushing.
What contentment would it not be to me to hear any one thus relate to me the manners, faces, countenances, the ordinary words and fortunes of my ancestors? how attentively should I listen to it! In earnest, it would be evil nature to despise so much as the pictures of our friends and predecessors, the fashion of their clothes and arms. I preserve their writing, seal, and a particular sword they wore, and have not thrown the long staves my father used to carry in his hand, out of my closet:—
“A father’s garment and ring is by so much dearer to his posterity, as there is the greater affection towards parents.”
If my posterity, nevertheless, shall be of another mind, I shall be avenged on them; for they cannot care less for me than I shall then do for them. All the traffic that I have in this with the public is, that I borrow their utensils of writing, which are more easy and most at hand; and in recompense shall, peradventure, keep a pound of butter in the market from melting in the sun:—
“Let not wrappers be wanting to tunnyfish, nor olives; . . . and I shall supply loose coverings to mackerel.”
And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts? In moulding this figure upon myself, I have been so often constrained to temper and compose myself in a right posture, that the copy is truly taken, and has in some sort formed itself; painting myself for others, I represent myself in a better coloring than my own natural complexion. I have no more made my book than my book has made me: ’tis a book consubstantial with the author, of a peculiar design, a parcel of my life, and whose business is not designed for others, as that of all other books is. In giving myself so continual and so exact an account of myself, have I lost my time? For they who sometimes cursorily survey themselves only, do not so strictly examine themselves, nor penetrate so deep, as he who makes it his business, his study, and his employment, who intends a lasting record, with all his fidelity, and with all his force. The most delicious pleasures digested within, avoid leaving any trace of themselves, and avoid the sight not only of the people, but of any other person. How often has this work diverted me from troublesome thoughts? and all that are frivolous should be reputed so. Nature has presented us with a large faculty of entertaining ourselves alone; and often calls us to it, to teach us that we owe ourselves in part to society, but chiefly and mostly to ourselves. That I may habituate my fancy even to meditate in some method and to some end, and to keep it from losing itself and roving at random, ’tis but to give to body and to record all the little thoughts that present themselves to it. I give ear to my whimsies, because I am to record them. It often falls out, that being displeased at some action that civility and reason will not permit me openly to reprove, I here disgorge myself, not without design of public instruction: and also these poetical lashes:—
“A slap on his eye, a slap on his snout, a slap on Sagoin’s back,”
imprint themselves better upon paper than upon the flesh. What if I listen to books a little more attentively than ordinary, since I watch if I can purloin anything that may adorn or support my own? I have not at all studied to make a book, but I have in some sort studied because I had made it; if it be studying to scratch and pinch now one author, and then another, either by the head or foot, not with any design to form opinions from them, but to assist, second, and fortify those I already have embraced.
But whom shall we believe in the report he makes of himself in so corrupt an age? considering there are so few, if any at all, whom we can believe when speaking of others, where there is less interest to lie. The first thing done in the corruption of manners is banishing truth; for, as Pindar says, to be true is the beginning of a great virtue, and the first article that Plato requires in the governor of his Republic. The truth of these days is not that which really is, but what every man persuades another man to believe; as we generally give the name of money not only to pieces of the just alloy, but even to the false also, if they will pass. Our nation has long been reproached with this vice; for Salvianus of Marseilles, who lived in the time of the Emperor Valentinian, says that lying and forswearing themselves is with the French not a vice, but a way of speaking. He who would enhance this testimony, might say that it is now a virtue in them; men form and fashion themselves to it as to an exercise of honor; for dissimulation is one of the most notable qualities of this age.
I have often considered whence this custom that we so religiously observe should spring, of being more highly offended with the reproach of a vice so familiar to us than with any other, and that it should be the highest insult that can in words be done us to reproach us with a lie. Upon examination, I find that it is natural most to defend the defects with which we are most tainted. It seems as if by resenting and being moved at the accusation, we in some sort acquit ourselves of the fault; though we have it in effect, we condemn it in outward appearance. May it not also be that this reproach seems to imply cowardice and feebleness of heart? of which can there be a more manifest sign than to eat a man’s own words—nay, to lie against a man’s own knowledge? Lying is a base vice; a vice that one of the ancients portrays in the most odious colors when he says, “that it is to manifest a contempt of God, and withal a fear of men.” It is not possible more fully to represent the horror, baseness, and irregularity of it; for what can a man imagine more hateful and contemptible than to be a coward towards men, and valiant against his Maker? Our intelligence being by no other way communicable to one another but by a particular word, he who falsifies that betrays public society. ’Tis the only way by which we communicate our thoughts and wills; ’tis the interpreter of the soul, and if it deceive us, we no longer know nor have further tie upon one another; if that deceive us, it breaks all our correspondence, and dissolves all the ties of government. Certain nations of the newly discovered Indies (I need not give them names, seeing they are no more; for, by wonderful and unheard-of example, the desolation of that conquest has extended to the utter abolition of names and the ancient knowledge of places) offered to their gods human blood, but only such as was drawn from the tongue and ears, to expiate for the sin of lying, as well heard as pronounced. That good fellow of Greece said that children are amused with toys and men with words.
As to our diverse usages of giving the lie, and the laws of honor in that case, and the alteration they have received, I defer saying what I know of them to another time, and shall learn, if I can, in the meanwhile, at what time the custom took beginning of so exactly weighing and measuring words, and of making our honor interested in them; for it is easy to judge that it was not anciently amongst the Romans and Greeks. And it has often seemed to me strange to see them rail at and give one another the lie without any quarrel. Their laws of duty steered some other course than ours. Caesar is sometimes called thief, and sometimes drunkard, to his teeth. We see the liberty of invective they practised upon one another, I mean the greatest chiefs of war of both nations, where words are only revenged with words, and do not proceed any farther.
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Copyright © By Dr. Adel Elsaie, Book
Title: "History of Truth, The Truth about God and Religions"
I was reading the Holy Bible, Easy-To-Read
Version - Matthew 18:10-14. I found that the number of verse 11 existed with no
text! The footnote for this verse states that some Greek copies add verse 11:
“The Son of Man came to save lost people.” I could not believe it. Some
Greek copies add a verse and some don’t. So the Easy-To-Read Version decided
against including this verse. Why? Isn’t the Bible the “inspired Word” of God
that no verse should be added, removed, or changed?
I started investigating this problem by looking
at footnotes! I was shocked that this is a common problem in the Word of God.
Many of the following verses also do not exist in American Standard Version,
Revised Standard Version, and New Revised Standard. These verses exist mainly in
King James Version. The Text that is added or deleted is italicized.
Matthew 17:21 No Text Howbeit this kind
goeth not out but by prayer and fasting
Matthew 18:11 No Text For the Son of man
is come to save that which was lost
Matthew 23:14 No Text Woe unto you,
scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a
pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation
Mark 7:16 No Text If any man have ears to
hear, let him hear.
Mark 9:44 No Text Where their worm dieth
not, and the fire is not quenched
Mark 9:46 No Text Where their worm dieth
not, and the fire is not quenched
Mark 11:26 No Text But if ye do not
forgive, neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses
Mark 15:28 No Text And the scripture was
fulfilled, which saith, And he was numbered with the transgressors.
Mark 16:9-20, The short Gospel according to
Mark does not include the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, 12 verses. The
long Gospel according to Mark includes these 12 verses!!
Luke 9:54 Text Addition And when his
disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we command
fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?
Luke 9:55 Text Addition But he turned, and
rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of.
Luke 10:1. “After these things the Lord
appointed other seventy” Some Geek versions have the number 70, others
Luke 17:36 No Text Two men shall be in the
field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.
Luke 22:19-20 Some Greek versions do not have
the last part of verse 19 and all of 20. This is the part when Jesus said:
The bread is my body, and the wine is my blood.
Luke 23:17 No Text (For of necessity he
must release one unto them at the feast.)
John 3: 16-21 Some scholars think these are
Jesus’ words. Others think John added these verses start with “For God
so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
John 5:3 Text Addition In these lay a
great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the
moving of the water.
John 5:4 No Text For an angel went down at
a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first
after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever
disease he had
John 7:53 to 8:11. The story of the woman
that was caught in Adultery does not exist. Old and best Greek copies do not
have these verses?!
Acts 8:37 No Text And Philip said, If thou
believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I
believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
Acts 15:34 No Text Notwithstanding it
pleased Silas to abide there still.
Acts 24:6-8 Some Greek copies add last part
of verse 6, verse 7, and first part of verse 8.
Acts 28:29 No Text And when he had said
these words, the Jews departed, and had great reasoning among themselves.
The serious question about the
above deleted verses is: Who added them in the beginning? And why? There are big
sections that added in Mark 16:9-20 and John 7:53 to 8:11. These are clear
evidence that the Church has tampered with the New Testament. Are the above
verses “inspired corrections,” “inspired additions,” or “inspired deletions.”?
Bible Has Been Corrupted
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Development of neuroprotective therapies for neurodegenerative disease face extraordinary challenges, related to both the complexity of neuropathogenesis, bioavailability of drugs in vulnerable brain regions and timing of treatment. For example, AD and PD likely begin many decades before a clinically significant phenotype is noticeable; thus therapeutic strategies face an uphill battle because damage to vulnerable neuronal pathways may have passed a critical point for repair and return to pre-morbid homeostasis. In contrast, HAND provides some unique opportunities for therapeutic intervention not least because (i) the onset of HIV-1 infection is usually a definable event that can be routinely tested and (ii) early events in HAND likely involve reversible synaptic injury (see above).
Despite this, previous trials of adjunctive therapy for HAND have been unsuccessful. As noted above, a recent meta-analysis of the published outcomes of ten trials of adjunctive therapies involving 711 people with HIV-1 and neurologic disease, concluded that there was no evidence for efficacy in terms of cognitive improvement. While many of these agents had not been evaluated in an appropriate in vivo
model of HAND, a notable exception was memantine. Memantine blocks the NMDA receptor-associated ion channel only when it is excessively (i.e. pathologically) open, and as such, does not remain in the channel long enough to block normal excitatory neurotransmission. Despite success in preclinical small animal models,[11
] memantine failed to significantly improve any
neuropsychologic indices in a phase II double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled, multi-center trial (plus best anti-retroviral therapy) in patients with HAND.[12
] Interestingly, this was the first clinical study of HIV-associated dementia in which surrogate markers (magnetic resonance spectroscopy, i.e. MRS) were validated with clinical presentation, as quantified by neurocognitive testing, and in which the surrogate markers appeared to be even more sensitive than the cognitive testing or neurologic examination. MRS was used to quantify N-acetylaspartate (NAA), a metabolite that is chiefly found in neurons in the adult brain, and the ratio of NAA to creatine (Cr) was used as an index of neuronal function and viability. Significant increases in NAA/Cr were observed in the multivariate analysis among individuals receiving memantine compared to placebo in the frontal white matter and the parietal cortex. Thus, memantine’s failure to elicit clinical improvements in neuropsychologic parameters despite an increase in the MRS parameter NAA that was presumably indicative of preserved neuronal integrity in corresponding brain regions, may reflect the fact that neuroinflammation can prevent activity-dependent (i.e. LTP) processes both upstream and downstream of the NMDA-R channel.[13
This emphasizes the need to design adjunctive therapies that take into account both neuroinflammation caused by HIV-1 viral products and pro-inflammatory mediators, and the activity-dependent nature of neuronal networks vulnerable to these neurotoxins, rather than simply quantifying neuronal apoptosis or even synaptic transmission as a therapeutic endpoint.
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SSDs get special skinny Sata interconnect
IDF There's a burning need for a standard interconnect for netbook-oriented solid-state drives, apparently. Well, according to the Serial ATA International Organisation, the body behind the bus, there is.
To fill the gap, it has introduced mini-Sata - aka mSata. Regular Sata ports aren't exactly large, but they're clearly still too big for SSDs, according to the Sata-IO. So mSata runs 1.5Gb/s and 3Gb/s signalling over what is essentially a mini-PCI connector.
But why bother? After all, Sata is already a de facto netbook storage standard. Most netbooks come with hard drives these days and the vast majority of them use regular Sata connectors.
Those netbooks that do incorporate SSDs often use mini-PCI, so it should be possible to adopt mSata by changing the motherboard circuitry and chips but not the physical connector.
This will allow owners of future SSD-equipped netbooks to upgrade their storage more easily than is the case today. Now, you need to find a drive upgrade that's specific to your machine. But the real boon is for manufacturers who should be able to add solid-state storage more cheaply.
Toshiba's already announced a pair of mSata drives, available in 30GB and 62GB capacities. ®
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Image: Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten under CC 3.0
Negotiating with health care providers for less expensive rates has become increasingly common among the uninsured. However, can it work if you already have a health insurance plan?
Some experts believe that it can. They recommend simply shopping around and calling different doctors for price quotes. This will be very helpful for those with high-deductible HSA plans, which force people to pay cash up front for most doctor visits and procedures. Full cash payments are more likely to convince providers to give medical discounts.
With managed care plans, it might be cheaper to stay within the provider network. Even within the network, it still make sense to compare the cost of medical procedures.
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Award-winning journalist Hannah Nordhaus tells the remarkable story of John Miller, one of America’s foremost migratory beekeepers, who tasks himself with the care and safe transportation of billions of bees. He is descended from N.E. Miller, America’s first migratory beekeeper, and trucks his hives from crop to crop, working the North Dakotan clover in summer and the Californian almonds in winter. He provides the crucial buzz to farmers who are otherwise bereft of natural pollinators, and does so for a price. But while there is steady demand for Miller’s miracle workers, especially from the multi-billion-dollar almond industry (without bees an acre of almonds produces no more than 30 lbs of nuts; with bees, 2,000 lbs), he’s faced with ever-mounting hive losses. In addition to traditional scourges like bears, wax moths, American foulbrood, tracheal mite, varroa mite, Africanized bees, overturned tractor trailers, bee thieves, etc beekeepers now lose hives in the most mysterious of ways, when whole colonies simply fly away, abandoning their combs, in an epidemic known as Colony Collapse Disorder. While bad news is in constant supply, Miller forges ahead because he can’t imagine doing anything else. He copes and moves on. He works and sometimes triumphs, all with an inspiring sense of humor. The Beekeeper’s Lament tells his story and that of his bees, creating a complex, moving, and unforgettable portrait of man in the new natural world.
Listen to the Book Buzz!Kayleigh George
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Letters of the Blessed Theodoret,
XI. To Flavianus Bishop of Constantinople.
The Creator and Guide of the Universe has made you a luminary of the world, and changed the deep moonless night into clear noon. Just as by the haven's side, the beacon light shews sailors in the night time the harbour mouth, so shines the bright ray of your holiness to give great comfort to all that are attacked for true religion's sake, and shews them the safe port of the Apostles' faith. They that know it already are filled with comfort, and they that knew it not are saved from being dashed upon the rocks. I indeed am especially bound to praise the giver of all good, because I have found a noble champion who drives away fear of men by the power of the fear of God, fights heartily in the front rank for the doctrines of the Gospel, and gladly bears the brunt of the apostolic war. So to-day every tongue is moved in eulogy of your holiness, for it is not only the nurslings of true religion who admire the purity of your faith, but the praises of your courage are sung even by the enemies of the truth. Falsehood vanishes at truth's lightning flash.
I write thus knowing that the very reverend and pious Hypatius the reader, both readily obeys the bidding of your holiness, and constantly, my Lord, mentions your laudable deeds. I salute you as holy and right dear to God. I exhort you to support us with your prayers that we may lead the rest of our lives according to God's laws.
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I’ve often discussed on this blog how the advantage of having a fiat currency is that one can deficit spend when you need to (think of it as being on the gold standard, except that you can mine as much gold as you need, when you need it)*. Of course, if you deficit spend when there is no idle capacity (human or mechanical) in the real economy, this can lead to inflation. Likewise, if you flood a sector or group of people with dollars when they don’t need it, this also will lead to inflation and price distortion, and can result in socially undesirable outcomes (e.g., rampant income inequality).
The point is that deficit spending itself isn’t bad, it’s how one creates deficits that can be the problem. Republican governor of Florida Rick Scott has decided to be the poster child for bad deficit spending (italics mine):
Yes, Scott is proposing $5 billion in state spending reductions (in absolute terms, not reductions from some sort of current-services budget). Many of these cuts seemed to be ideologically driven, such as the decimation of the state Department of Community Affairs, which runs growth-management programs hated by developers; and a (roughly) ten percent cut in K-12 education, part and parcel of the state GOP’s war with teachers and other state employees.
But the size of the cuts wouldn’t be nearly so high if Scott were not also insisting on major tax cuts, notably in corporate taxes (due to be phased out entirely in a few years) and in state-controlled property taxes that support public schools.
Moreoever, nestled in his budget proposal are spending increases that are designed to redistribute resources according to conservative ideological prescriptions. Most remarkable is his request for $800 million (over two years) for “economic development incentives,” which almost certainly means a gubernatorially-controlled slush fund to be used to bribe companies to relocate to Florida through tax abatements, free government services, and other subsidies. And even as he sought major cuts in public school funding (in a state already facing something of a school financing crisis), he managed to find room to propose $250 million in private-school vouchers.
…He may or may not get his way on the details with a Republican-controlled legislature, but he has certainly initiated class warfare, and a redistribution of public resources to those “job creators” at the top of the income and power pyramid, with a vengeance.
This is the
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ROANOKE, Va. (AP) — Southern Coal Corp. is recalling several hundred laid-off miners in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia and plans to hire 650 new workers.
Roanoke-based Southern Coal announced Tuesday that it has entered into a multiyear contract to supply coal to American Electric Power. The contract will allow it to restart mines idled earlier this year and to save 500 jobs.
Southern Coal is owned by the Justice Family, which includes Jim Justice, who also owns The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia.
“We are so happy to be able to save the jobs, and hire the 650 new miners, especially at this time of the year. We hope this will make the holidays a little better for those effected,” Jim Justice and his son, Jay Justice, said in the company’s news release.
Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin hailed Tuesday’s announcement as good news for the workers and their states’ economies.
“Today’s announcement is a victory for the hard working men and women and their families in the coal counties of Kentucky, West Virginia and Virginia. The number of jobs saved and created by this multi-year agreement will benefit our region for generations to come,” Beshear said.
Tomblin said the contract means 1,700 jobs for the region, and it will have a large impact on communities’ continued economic growth.
McDonnell said coal is an important part of Virginia’s “all of the above” domestic energy strategy.
Southern Coal also has operations in Alabama and Tennessee. The company said it expects to produce 9 million tons of coal in 2013.
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Stalled German economy will hurt euro
German Chancellor Angela Merkel
TEXT OF STORY
Bill Radke: The economic engine of Europe has run out of steam. Figures just released show the German recovery has stalled. Marketplace's Europe correspondent, Stephen Beard, has our story.
Stephen Beard: Europe's powerhouse helped pull the rest of the eurozone out of recession in the first half of last year. But the German economy stagnated in the last quarter. The end of the cash for clunkers scheme hit demand at home, and exports failed to pick up the slack. Germany's now suffering from Chinese competition.
Germany's weakness is casting a pall over the rest of the eurozone, and that, says Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research, means more trouble for the single currency.
Charles Dumas: The euro economy is feeble and I would be expecting investors in euroland to be trying to get their capital out into places where there are rather better prospects. And of course, that will bring down the euro.
He says the Germans have made matters worse for themselves and the euro by insisting on big cuts in public spending in Greece and other southern European countries. He says that will further undermine demand for German goods.
In London, this is Stephen Beard for Marketplace.
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(page 3 of 4)
A key ingredient in her cocktail was the educational approach Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), at the time the center of a firestorm in the autism community thanks to a groundbreaking book, Let Me Hear Your Voice, by Catherine Maurice. Maurice claimed to have cured two of her children of autism by hiring a teacher to utilize this behavior modification approach, researched and deemed effective in some well-known studies by UCLA’s Ivor Lovaas. ABA draws on principles of classical conditioning to help autistic children learn essential social skills, while unlearning negative, obstructive behaviors. “It’s a good technique to try first, because it does work in a lot of cases,” Reed says, adding, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, “If you’ve ever trained a puppy, you know it works.”
Here’s an example of how it can be applied: Say a therapist wanted to teach a child to make eye contact when he heard someone say his name. In ABA technique, she would start by saying the name while waving the child’s favorite toy in front of her face. When the child responds the way the therapist intends, he’s rewarded—by being given the toy to play with. As the exercise is repeated, the child will make eye contact with the therapist even when he no longer wins the toy. Eventually, the goal is to get the child to “internalize” the behavior so that he will make eye contact every time someone says his name, because that action in itself is rewarding.
It was another Connecticut mother of a child diagnosed with autism in 1994 who ultimately helped create a private school centered around the principles and strategies of ABA. Suzanne Letso, CEO of Milford’s Connecticut Center for Child Development (CCCD), initially found herself at a loss as to how to help her son, Tyler. She discovered ABA while researching best practices at the Yale Medical Library. “Behavioral strategies were the only ones that seemed to have any empirical support. Researchers were saying, ‘Look, kids who receive this kind of intervention end up on a very different trajectory than those who don’t. There’s this small but sizable group who can either become normal or approach normalcy and lead relatively independent lives.’”
Letso soon realized that ABA was nowhere to be found in Connecticut. “There wasn’t a single behavioral analyst nor any school that provided it, though there was an outcry for people to be able to access these kinds of services,” she says. So, along with another mother of a child with autism she met at a local playground, she set about “making it up,” putting together a team of willing therapists and a consultant who pieced together a regimen based upon what they read. Tyler proved to be apt student for a program that was definitely trial-and-error. “Ty made more progress in the first six weeks of our little home school than he had in the entire year previous,” Letso says. “But if I knew then what I know now, I believe he would have made even more profound improvements.”
Fast-forward 14 years. Tyler is now 18, with an IQ of 45, and still moderately impacted by autism. Says his mom, “When he was 4, I was told that when he was 15 he’d be in a shelter somewhere weaving baskets—he would never talk or be able to hold a job. Most of those things turned out not to be true, though he will always need supports.” Meanwhile, the CCCD, established in 1997, now educates 50 students across the spectrum in two Milford locations (a new facility will break ground this fall), providing individualized, 30-hour-per-week core programs administered by 74 full-time employees. There’s also a home-based outreach program, community education and recreation initiatives and a vocational training program. CCCD has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal and named one of the top professional providers nationwide for children with autism.
Ivor Lovaas’ original studies projected that 50 percent of autistic children treated with ABA would make a full recovery, but Letso admits that the true percentages are not nearly that high. “We have our share of kids who have either lost their autism diagnosis upon re-evaluation or graduated from the program with a lesser diagnosis, like ‘learning disabled,’” she says. “We hope that they will have marriages and families and mortgages like the rest of us. We also have kids who have been with us since the school started. But if we count only children who have lost their diagnosis as successful, then we’re doing children who have made significant gains in what they can learn and do a huge disservice.”
What happens to kids with autism when they grow up? For that matter, what’s being done to educate the significant others—parents, peers, siblings, neighbors, teachers, law-enforcement agents—who are dealing with people on the spectrum every day? Community networks like ASCONN and Wallingford’s Autism Spectrum Resource Center (ASRC) aren’t the only agencies that have tried to step into the breach, but they’ve been among the most active.
Small but stalwart ASCONN, established in 1977 as a chapter of the Autism Society of America, has a three-prong mission: information and referral, advocacy and financial assistance. It hosts autism orientation workshops for parents, teachers and school paraprofessionals, faith communities and even Girl Scout troops, and sponsors an annual statewide conference every April during Autism Awareness Month. Moreover, the society offers a grant program, awarding stipends of $1,000 to parents of autistic children who need safety and security items (30 such grants were given out last year). “Many kids with autism don’t have language, don’t respond to their name and don’t understand danger,” says Sara Reed, “but can figure out locks and climb out windows. I’m not aware of anyone offering any program like ours.”
Founded in 1990 by Lois Rosenwald, the mother of a grown son with Asperger syndrome (who today works in the insurance industry), ASRC’s reach has been even more formidable. Its initiatives have included establishing support groups for adults on the spectrum (and spouses of men with autism); in November, the center will host its first “transition conference,” designed to educate parents and school personnel on the needs of the high school graduate with autism. Says Rosenwald, “We’ve got kids who we’ve put all this money, energy and time into, and then they graduate at 18 or 21 and that’s really the end of the road for services that are available in Connecticut. The high schools are just not doing their jobs getting these kids ready to go to work. We’ve just brought on a transition consultant. Her job is going to be getting out there and helping families on a one-on-one basis, but also working in the school districts.”
Another major initiative has been educating “first responders”: policemen, EMTs, emergency-room personnel and fire departments. Because of their inability to understand what Ami Klin calls “implicit social rules,” people with autism often find themselves in trouble with the law for not understanding that, say, following someone on the street might be perceived as stalking, or that (among its other negative aspects) downloading child porn from the Internet is illegal. “We’ve had four people this year alone in the state of Connecticut who have been arrested for the latter,” Rosenwald says. “We know young men go online and go to porn sites; our folks aren’t any different in that respect. But they’re not predators, just very naive.”
One of Rosenwald’s proudest achievements has been the launch of a pilot program in peer-to-peer social mentoring for adults on the spectrum in the New Haven area, an idea that she hopes will help change the too-sad and familiar scenario of adults with autism falling into the grip of the mental health system or nursing homes. “This gets people out of the house and teaches them appropriate community behavior, how to access public resources, shop for and cook meals, do their banking, even find a job. We feel a very large portion of the population can work and support themselves. They’re never going to be without a need for limited services, but we’re not talking big dollars here. Through this program we’re seeing people who had no self-esteem start to blossom. Give a person a job and a friend, and it’s amazing what those two things can do.”
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On cold, wet or humid days, retreating indoors for a walk can sound pretty appealing. After experiencing workouts both indoors and out early in your walking career, you may begin to wonder about the differences in muscular and cardiovascular use between linear movement over land and stationery walks on a treadmill. The indoor ones are more monotonous and leave you feeling like a rat in a cage, but when the weather says "Walk indoors or don't walk" you want to know if the indoor workout does the same for your health. Long story, short: yes. Whether inside or out, walking for X amount of time, at X intensity, using identical technique, will use the same calories and give you an equivalent aerobic workout.
You do move slightly differently, though: the belt rotating underneath your feet means you are doing tiny little jumps up and down as you walk instead of just pushing off from behind. The belt will also force your forefoot to slap down quicker and perhaps harder than usual, which could cause additional shin aches. You might also discover other tiny aches in muscles that take you by surprise because of a slightly different manner of moving. Still, better to do something, than nothing. Now come the caveats and tips:
Walking at X intensity - Notice that we did not say "speed". When you are indoors on a treadmill, you do not have to overcome wind and air resistance to move your body forward. So you will have to either choose a slightly faster speed indoors (about 0.1-0.2 mph more; choose less the slower you are going) to reach the same outdoor intensity, or you will have to walk the same speed but select a 1-percent grade. Both methods will allow you to match intensities. This general guideline applies to those moving at a brisk walk (less than 12-minute miles). The faster you go, the more you would have to increase the speed (up to 0.3 more) for an equivalent pace, but the 1-percent rule holds true. Check your heart rate for the best match in intensity. Wireless heart rate monitors give the most accurate continuous reading for you to check during your workout.
Using identical technique - Too often, treadmills seduce walkers into cranking up the speed or incline beyond what they can comfortably manage. So they hang from the front bar or side handles to be able to keep up with the rotating belt. Remember, you do not have anything to hang onto outside. If you are supporting your body weight by an object, you are using less personal energy to ambulate forward, therefore using less muscle (other than in those gripping hands) and fewer calories. Keep speed and incline under control. Stand tall and swing your arms just as you do outside. Keep your shoulders relaxed and your eyes cast outward, not down at the controls. Using mirrors in front or beside you can help you occasionally check your technique (that is an advantage over the great outdoors). Do not neglect making use of the exact control over speed and incline. Throw in occasional jaunts of hills or bursts of speed to break up the monotony of staring at a blank wall.
See also our Walking Section
Run The Planet thanks the GearTrends website (www.geartrends.com) for the permission to reprint the article "Treadmill workouts: a quick guide to technique and fun" by Therese Iknoian, author of "Fitness Walking" (Human Kinetics, second edition, 2005). GearTrends is the most thorough source for news, products, how-to and trend information for the outdoor and fitness industries. Text © 2005 by Therese Iknoian. No reprints or use without permission. Illustration © 2005 by Run The Planet.
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Solar Energy Housing Estates: 11 Steps towards Sustainability
Together with several building companies, the city of Cologne has so far established a total of 11 energy efficient housing estates with some 900 residential units that utilise solar energy. They were funded by the "Building with the Sun" programme involving 50 solar housing estates that is run by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
On the one hand, the aim of the project is to achieve significant reductions in energy demand through appropriate solar construction methods (max. 15 kWh/m²a) and on the other, it is to meet most of the remaining energy needs with solar energy (60% of energy requirements) or with energy from other renewable sources.
Most of the projects are in existing buildings, as is the case in Cologne-Bocklemünd, a project area with buildings of up to ten floors where large photovoltaic panels have been integrated into the façades or attached to the balcony balustrades. The most recent project, in Cologne- Ossendorf, included improvements in thermal insulation by 80%, central heating with wood pellets, 150 m2 of solar thermal collectors and a 200 m2 photovoltaic system.
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Letter - Minnesotans are fortunateIn the December 30 Echo Press, a Republican blamed Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Al Franken and President Obama for not ending the war in Iraq.
To the editor:
In the December 30 Echo Press, a Republican blamed Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Al Franken and President Obama for not ending the war in Iraq. The attack is unjustified. Both senators are supporting the president in his effort to shift form the ill-conceived war in Iraq to targeting the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Republicans blocked Senator Franken from taking office until July 2009 and are now accusing him of not working fast enough to end the war. Both Senator Klobuchar and Senator Franken have pledged support for our troops and advocate for the resources needed to supply them with the equipment required to carry out their mission.
December 2009 was the first month since the Iraq War started in 2003 that there were no U.S. combat fatalities. The cost of the Iraq War in lives and dollars is indefensible. Some Republicans, like Dick Cheney, deny the mistakes of the Iraq War and are trying to rewrite history to support their own beliefs.
Both senators support President Obama’s counter-terrorism measures, as well as his economic recovery policies. Not a single Republican voted for any economic recovery legislation. It appears to be more important for Republicans to defeat Democrats than to work together to help the nation recover from tough economic conditions.
Minnesotans are fortunate to have Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken working for us in the Senate.
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Following the deaths of three teenagers in October of last year, Commissioner Simpson organized and convened the Railroad Crossings Leadership Oversight Committee; comprised of representatives from agencies, such as the Federal Railroad Administration, Federal Highway Administration, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NJ Department of Education, State Police, Motor Vehicle Commission and NJ Division of Highway Traffic Safety, NJ TRANSIT Police, NJDOT, NJ Transit and Operation Lifesaver.
"This committee has relentlessly pursued every available avenue to prevent fatalities on the rail system, through an approach we call ‘E-cubed'- Engineering, Enforcement and Education," said Commissioner Simpson. "Today, we are taking this approach to the next level, launching more aggressive enforcement, preparing to install new physical barriers and technological warning systems and airing a duo of blunt, no-nonsense public service announcements that crystallize the very impact wrought by poor choices at railroad crossings."
At the direction of Commissioner Simpson and the committee, NJDOT and NJ TRANSIT will be deploying Dynamic Message signs at high-risk grade-crossing locations, to remind pedestrians of the importance of obeying warning and safety devices. NJ Transit will soon be testing a new, "second train coming" warning sign at the Outwater Lane crossing in Garfield, adjacent to the new Plauderville rail station. This warning sign is slated to be operational by mid-July.
Further, NJ Transit will be piloting "gate skirts" at the Aberdeen-Matawan station, providing a second physical barrier to thwart trespassers who often "duck" under the crossing gates at this specific location. Aberdeen-Matawan is one of four stations of enforcement focus (including Walnut Street in Montclair, Convent Station in Morris Township and Radburn Station in Fair Lawn) with a high rate of trespasser activity; all of whom will be the subject of increased, visual police enforcement through this initiative.
At the direction of Commissioner Simpson, the committee was tasked with developing strategies in the areas of Engineering, Enforcement and Education in order to ramp up safety across the state's rail network, particularly in areas where trains travel through densely populated neighborhoods.
Immediate actions implemented included the implementation of the Trespasser Intrusion Program (T.I.P.), requiring locomotive engineers, train crew members and other field personnel to identify and report patterns of trespasser activity to enable law enforcement officials to respond appropriately. A new educational video entitled "It's Your Choice" was also created for use in the education program, which includes first-person testimony from impacted NJ Transit employees as well as surveillance footage taken from the four railroad crossings cited above for enforcement purposes.
Additional educational tactics implemented included the creation of a safety message, safety tips and a YouTube video for the njtransit.com home page; utilizing social media tactics to influence teens and young adults; issuing safety alerts via My Transit, which sends travel information directly to customers' emails or web-enabled mobile devices and creating a safety bumper sticker to place on all NJ TRANSIT non-revenue vehicles. With today's release of the new public service announcements, all of the original proposed educational tactics have been successfully implemented.
The new public service announcements can be viewed on NJ TRANSIT's website at njtransit.com/safety.
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